


Outrunning Fate

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Pseudoscience, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 04:32:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1674803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>First there is a virus.  Then there is a vaccine.  But in the end, there are zombies where humans once were and a handful of (un)lucky survivors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> for la-picchio at tumblr who offered the suggestion to help me fill my own quest to write 25 AltMal AU's.

Altair was born fucked over by fate long before the end of the world. His mother was dead before he was even born, kept on life-support by his grief-stricken Father and his painfully-practical Grandmother who couldn’t bear to let her daughter’s death be _meaningless_. Altair was born in a snowstorm so viciously unrelenting that the doctor who cut him out of his Mother’s unresisting body hadn’t left the hospital in two days.

\--

The end of the world came on step-by-step. It was the half-heard noise of someone else’s radio or the gossip of one-two-three men passed over a crappy hand at poker. There was no great siren of warning but a curious whisper of wonder-at-that. 

Sullivan—big and blond and dumb—said, “did you hear about that virus that’s been taking out like everyone in Nigeria or something?”

Smith said, “Isn’t there always a virus in Nigeria wiping out the population?” And they laughed because they were big-tall-strong American boys skating by deployment with a delicate balance of fearless immortality and scared-shitless bravado. 

\--

The other guys called him ‘Lad’ (luh-Ad) because the concept of using his actual fucking name was far-and-beyond anything they could have managed. Altair tolerated it because it was better-not-worse than most of the things he had been called or some of the more embarrassing attempts at pronouncing his name. 

“Lad!” they shouted at him when he was trying to catch six-seconds of sleep away from the commotion. “Lad you have to see this!” They were scuttled-in-close around a grainy-screen listening to the foreign broadcast of a new paranoia. Everyone was ducked-in-close, reverent with silence and for just that moment, it was quiet enough to sleep.

\--

Altair was back-in-America for the holidays, that year. He sat in the bar at the end of the street he grew up on (friendly old Uncle Ray, always ready with something illegal for underage drinkers like he had been) raising a toast to the television. The bar was a sleepy-crawl of old men with no families and Uncle Ray himself wearing a ring of twinkling tree lights around his neck. 

“What do you think of all this? Any of it real?” Uncle Ray asked him.

Altair shrugged his shoulder, ate through a bowl of peanuts and drank the on-the-house draft while his Uncle Ray (no relation) got steadily drunker. The television prattled on about the fundraiser-for-hope (or whatever the hell they were calling it now). They showed sobbing celebrities turning on the waterworks over children with flies on their faces and the unimaginable pile of bodies of the _dead_. The host got choked up in the middle of his monologue and stared in numb-shock and dull-horror at the pictures of the streets full of bodies slowly-swelling with disease. 

Merry-fucking-Christmas, nobody said. Altair sat back against the low back of the stool and took a moment to really fucking wonder if this was the end of the God-damned world. But the feeling faded, the way every-feeling faded, and he was left walking home like skating on the ice covered sidewalks after midnight.

\--

The heat was a fucking relief after exile in the God-forsaken northern USA. The other guys sometimes (not often) asked him where he was from (New York) and got the wrong ideas about how he was a city kid with an attitude and too much time on his hands. The other guys (not him) figured he was some immigrant’s son (that was actually right) living life under the oppressive rule of racism (sometimes true) that had turned to a life of petty crime (unfortunately untrue) before being sent away to the military to make something of himself.

Altair never-said-a-damn thing but they kept building the story like layers on a shit cake until he was some kind of living legend, age twenty-four. 

‘You going to get out for college, Lad?’ they asked him once-in-a-while and Altair always shook his head. They kept asking, kept telling him all the things he could do, how he had all the time in the world, how there was so much left for him. 

It wasn’t their fault they didn’t see the end coming.

\--

It was February when some genius decided to burn the bodies to ‘contain’ the virus or to slow the spread. There was a controversy playing across the big-strong-countries not-yet effected that listed reasons it was-and-wasn’t the best idea. 

A quack dug up from the basement of some state-university was all over American television telling everyone how burning the bodies was going to turn a localized virus into a global pandemic. He was laughed off stage, of course. 

Altair didn’t remembered his name, but he remembered the look of cold terror in his eyes when his objections were dismissed as insane. It would come to him, months later. But in the here-and-now, the man’s insanity was drowned out by a chorus of boos of the men taking up space on his right-and-left as they shouted their own expert-medical-opinions at the screen.

\--

March was a month of peace and painfully precautious reports of improvement. It was a month Altair spent far away from televisions and news programs, a month spent hiding-and-moving-and-trying not to die.

Shame it was the last moment of calm before the storm, shame that Altair spent it stuck with Sullivan complaining-and-ranting-and-complaining about his lot in life and how badly he was looking forward to getting out. Shame Sullivan got shot in the head, shame his brains got all over Altair on their way out.

\--

By April, blissful ignorance had given away to rabid panic. Men-and-women-and boys-and-girls were crowding doctor’s offices and hospital foyers complaining of the many-varied symptoms of the same fucking virus. There were government doctors on the television urging everyone to stay at home, reporting that maybe only 1% of the people reporting symptoms were actually experiencing a much less severe strain of the virus that wiped out most of the third world. (Of course they didn’t say that, the way they hadn’t ever said what was really happening.) 

The men in the barracks were overcome with coughs, sucking on their own snot and limping along with a pain in their bodies that was far-worse-and-far longer lasting than any cold-or-flu they’d ever had before. 

Recover-with-rest and drink-lots-of-water, the doctors on the television said. Don’t go to the emergency room unless you are _seriously ill_. 

\--

May didn’t bring flowers that year (well, it most likely did because Mother Earth could care less what the arrogant two legged monkeys that populated it did, really) but it brought the hope of a ‘vaccine’ to fight the virus. 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Smith, smarter than the average doctor naturally, said. “They couldn’t possibly have a viable vaccine already. It’s been three months. They couldn’t possibly. They’re insane.” 

But the vaccine was mass-produced before the end of May and given out in triage stages: medical personnel, government officials, and members of the military. Altair managed to duck out of the line for the vaccine three times in a row (not because he believed Smith-the-know-it-all but for the much simpler reason that he hated needles). The whole operation was a paperwork cluster fuck and after the third time someone either assumed he had gotten the stupid vaccine or had given up trying to save his miserable life.

The vaccine hit the public on May twenty second and every man-woman-and-child was urged to rush right out and get it. 

\--

The viral-videos hit the internet before the first of June but they didn’t become an international phenomenon until June second when #reallifezombies started trending on the internet. Altair wasn’t friendly with many people but he found himself in the crowd of men staring at the screen as they watched video-after-video of Brothers-Sisters-Grandmothers-Father-Mothers-children with their faces like mutated gray masks and their voices caught in something like guttural groan as they jerked around with stiffened joints and dulled-out eyes. 

They were everywhere, from nursing homes to grocery stores to cute little girl’s bedrooms with flowers on the wall. The men were laughing over hoaxes, trying to figure out how so many people managed to copy the same idea so closely (all over the world) while Smith-the-genius was going on about viral vids and the power they had over the collective consciousness of the whole planet. 

Altair agreed with Hello-Kitten-Gurl who said: ‘this freaks me out so much, can you just stop’. There was nothing funny-nothing clever-nothing even slightly natural in the nature of the vids. “Turn it off,” he said when they got to the sixteenth video but he left because they laughed at him for being _scared_.

\--

There wasn’t a lot that scared Altair—there never had been. (That had been a whole separate problem his Grandmother put him in counselling for. She had always been a little ‘put-off’ by him, because he was so quiet, because he was so emotionless, because he wasn’t afraid of anything. Because his mother had died before he was even born; that had to fuck someone up for life.) But he found himself stashing this-and-that without a credible explanation. Stashing-things wasn’t something the US Military looked kindly upon but he found that there was less-and-less rigid expectations as they days went on and more-and-more people blinking too slowly and looking too long at things that had made sense to them only yesterday.

Altair passed a superior officer looking down at a slip of paper with glassy-eyes as his mouth open-and-shut again and again but no sound (not a single little pip of a sound) came out. He didn’t sleep the whole night, lay in his bed thinking about the best way to get the fuck away in a _hurry_.

\--

When things went down, they went down _fast_. The last news broadcast he saw was from the President himself, trying his hardest to assure everyone that nothing-was-amiss and they were all United-and-Strong but the pallor of his skin and the strange dull glint in his eyes was as much a lie as the incomprehensible way he drawled his words into deadened little moans. 

The President called the reports of nurses-and-doctors turning into ‘zombies’ preposterous lies created on the internet. He condemned both the creators of the lies and the believers. He urged everyone to put their faith in their doctors. He promised that everyone would make it through this if they just worked together.

That was June nineteenth.

June twentieth, Smith woke up turned gray with hollow black spaces under his eyes and a sluggish groan caught in his throat. He shuffled his way through the day until he ended up standing next to Altair staring at his throat in a way that was decidedly unpleasant in any circumstances but even less pleasant with the way he licked his lips as he did it. “Hey Lad,” Smith said to him, his voice coming up from somewhere so deep in his chest it didn’t even sound _human_ anymore. “I think it’s happening. I think they were right.”

“Not funny,” Altair said.

And Smith just opened-and-closed his mouth as his bruised eyelids slid over his glassy eyes. There was no smile, no cackle of laughter from somewhere behind them, no gleeful joy at having cornered Altair into admitting a fear. There was nobody with a camera hiding behind a blind corner; there was only Smith with his slumping shoulders and his steady stare watching Altair’s pulse.

Altair ran-like-hell, as fast and as far as he could. He locked himself in a supply closet with his rations of food, armor, weapons, maps and communications equipment. There was a panic attack in his chest rattling like something _living_ clawing it’s way to get free. A great black fear covered his body in a cold sweat and left him shaking in the dimness of his closet clutching at his firearms and his knife like sweet-encouraging-hope.

\--

June twenty-first came at the stroke of midnight and a rattle of gunfire that woke Altair up with a jerk. He didn’t remember sleeping, didn’t remember anything but Smith and his open-and-shut soundless mouth. There was a repeating report of an automatic rifle and the high-pitched shriek of fear not-so-far away. 

Altair dressed like he was walking into an active combat zone, took all the weapons he could carry and strapped the bag he’d filled with enough rations to get the fuck away (fast) before he left his closet.

Around a sharp corner he found the first body leaning against the wall covered in thick-dark blood that had long since stopped pumping out of the wounds in the man’s chest. His head was split open by a series of gunshots to his face that made it impossible to tell who he used to be. He kept moving closer to the gunfire, over and past bodies torn open by rapid-fire, left bleeding the same thick-dark-blood. Two-then-six-then-ten-then-fifteen-twenty-thirty. He passed half the men he knew until he found the door that took him out into the yard. 

The gunfire had stopped (at last) and Altair snuck across the ground to find a good handhold to hoist himself up, off the ground and to a higher vantage point to get a better idea of what was happening. He went smooth-quick-and-quiet across the roof of the squat building, around to where the floodlights were illuminating the field between the two barracks. There was a mass of bodies, a great swelling of men-and-women as they climbed like ravenous animals over the corpses of the fallen to get at the last few real-humans that had taken refuge on top of transport vehicle in hopes of escape. 

All together they made a great inhuman sound, compacting flesh and rending moans as they reached with hands like claws and snapped their bloody mouths together. They moved like marionettes on tangled strings, a pantomime of something _living_ but the stiffness of their motion did nothing at all to stop them from dragging the last screaming survivors down into the pile.

Altair did not stay, he did not look again, he turned and _ran_.

\---&\---

Six months ago, Kadar came home from the university with a thick-white fear in his face. Malik had been exhausted-at-the-end of the long day, filthy with dirt and covered with a sweat that made his whole body slick as slime. 

“You should not be here,” Malik said when he saw his brother on his doorstep. He would have hugged his brother—baby brother, shorter and younger and so very often smarter—but Kadar grabbed him by the arm and dragged him away from the door. “What are you doing?”

They were around a corner, behind a crate, away from anyone’s eyes that might have cared (few did) when Kadar shoved him against the side of the building. He was wearing a scholar’s clothes with the air of knowledge hanging away from him like some clean godliness. His hands were soft when they caught Malik’s face and his thumb pushed his lip up towards his nose. With his other hand he pulled Malik’s right arm away from his body and pushed the length of his sleeve up toward his armpit. He was frantic as he looked at him, “have you gotten the virus—the flu they call it? Have you been sick?” 

“No. Kadar!” Malik pulled away from his brother and fixed his clothes that were pulled askew. “What is wrong?”

“Have you heard of the vaccine?” Kadar asked. When Malik shook his head, Kadar let out a breath of relief that was more worrisome than his sudden presence and his strange demands. Malik put a hand on Kadar’s shoulder and squeezed at the tight muscle at the base of his neck. 

“What’s happened?” Malik asked, “why are you afraid?” 

“We have to go,” Kadar said. “We have to go find somewhere far away from anyone that has been ill.” 

Malik laughed because the depth of Kadar’s sincerity was too severe for his (baby) brother to be _real_ but Kadar had shoved his arm away looked at him with a wide-eyed shock that drowned the last of Malik’s laugh. “What has happened?” Malik asked again.

“It’s the end of the world,” Kadar said. 

\--

Malik woke up to the alarm, groaned into his arm as he rolled out of his bed and climbed back to his feet in the dimness of the windowless room. His right hand was clumsy and half numb from being slept on as he felt along the wall until he found the familiar crumple of his long jacket. He pulled it on quickly and was out through the flap that served as his door even as he buttoned the jacket.

“What is it?” he asked Rauf when he ran into him in the narrow leaning hall that held the inhabitable spaces together like a tense threat. Any moment it seemed as if the whole poor construction of rooms would fall in the slightest of wind. 

“Someone’s at the gate,” Rauf said. His steps were quicker than Malik’s as he ran toward the exit and his haste prompted Malik to move twice-as-quick. They burst through the doors at the front of the awkward sprawl of hastily-made buildings and ran toward the outer fence. They had built it in layers—with the first layer being little but dried mud bricks and the outermost layer being made of the dismantled debris of many homes-and-vehicles salvaged during hastily executed supply runs. The so-called gate was little but the tiniest of gaps in the debris (easily located by someone with a fully operational brain). 

Malik took the ‘quick steps’, using the momentum of his body in motion to push him forward from one leaning stack of junk to the next until he stood on the platform where Maria was looking through her rifle scope at whoever-had-come searching for them. “What is it?”

“Good of you to show,” Maria said. There was a smirk at the edge of her face that did nothing but underscore the bitter tenseness in her voice. She said, “it’s a man. I’m no doctor but I doubt he’s infected.” She didn’t relax, didn’t let her grip on the rifle slip for even a moment as she tracked the motions of the man. 

Malik squinted across the distance between the (imagined) safety of their perch and where the dusty figure in the distance was picking his way through the wreckage. “He’s moving too quickly to be infected.” 

Rauf took his post and whistled across the distance to them. He didn’t have the rifle Maria did but was more than proficient with the many handguns he had strapped to his body. Malik leaned away from Maria and whistled back in two pulses.

“The pit?” Maria snapped at him. She looked away from her scope, dropped the rifle so it was pointing down-and-not-out to _stare_ at him with oh-so-much-more than simple hatred. “It was _your brother_ that said we couldn’t sustain our current population and you want to just _invite_ some bastard _in_?”

“Anyone that isn’t infected deserves a chance,” Malik said. He was moving away from her before she could argue the point with him (not that she hadn’t once before, not that she wouldn’t again). He went across the narrow rail that ran between the solid guard posts, up the two short steps that put him high enough to be seen beyond the wall. When he shouted, “go left!” the man climbing through the debris looked up toward him with a hand over his squinting eyes.

“English!” the man shouted back.

Rauf snickered to Malik’s left and Maria swore again before she shouted, “go left!” So it went, Maria repeating Malik’s words in English until they had the man stuck in the narrow gap between the innermost wall and the secondary wall. Rauf was standing on his left and Maria was on the right with her rifle still trained on the newcomer. Up close (as close as one could be from the top of an eight foot wall) the man was filthy with dirt, thin beneath the clothes that he wore—ragged, muddied and stiff. 

“He’s a soldier,” Maria said in Arabic. “Probably American. He’s armed.” 

The man pulled the strap across his chest and lifted a rifle over his head, show it to them with purpose and then set it on the ground. He pulled another two guns and set them down and then a knife that he laid over the rest before he straightened up and spread his arms. 

“Why are you here?” Malik asked. His English-was-terrible (at best) but he’d picked up the most basic things from Maria. “We are far.”

“I heard there was a genius kid doctor that swears the zombies are going to die in a year.” He looked at Maria, not at Malik, when he spoke. “It’s not like there’s a lot of places to go around here. Wherever the hell here is.”

“Where did you come from?” Malik asked.

“North,” the man said. After a pause he blinked up at the bright-hot sun at their backs and said, “I’m not infected.”

Malik looked at Maria who frowned her disapproval of the very-idea of allow this man to say and then at Rauf who said, “if he’s a soldier. It’s not like we’re overwhelmed with trained soldiers here.”

“Are you a soldier?” Maria shouted.

“I was.” But he wasn’t now, because none of them were what they once were. He put his hands on his hips and settled into an easy pose that allowed him limited view of all three of them and waited as Maria’s frown loosened into a scowl. 

“Check him,” she said. Then—loud enough to be heard—“take your clothes off! If you’re clean, we’ll let you talk to the doctor!”

There hadn’t been many people to find them, had been even less that found a way through the wreckage but there hadn’t been a single person that took being told to strip naked in front of a variety of guns and strangers without so much as a single moment of hesitation or objection. This man looked unsurprised as he started pulling his clothing apart. Piece after piece was dropped in the dirt before his chest-and-arms were bare, and then he unlaced his boots and set them aside with his holey socks stuffed into them. He stripped off his pants with a distinctly apathetic gesture and stood there (white as a ghost) with his arms stretched out at his sides. 

“Go check him, Malik,” Maria said. “It’s your turn.”

It was not his turn, if only because there was nobody else willing to wander into biting range of any unknown person. Malik leaned forward and stepped off the wall, falling seven feet to land with a thump in patch of dust well-worn from such usage. The stranger eyed him and then motioned that Malik could come closer. 

Up close, the stranger’s skin was filthy with dirt, pale and stretched across the muscle held tight to his bones and flaking apart here-and-there from lack of proper food and water. Malik got close enough to look for old-or-new wounds with the distinct bluish tinge of infection. It was close enough he could smell the unholy odor coming from the man that made him feel simultaneously revolted and apologetic to him. 

“Normally, I at least known the man’s first name when he’s this close to my naked body,” the man said. He said it in Arabic—flat and toneless—and only ever so slightly incorrect. There was a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth when Malik looked up at his face with a frown. “Her English is good, yours is not.”

“My name is Malik,” he said. “What is yours?”

“Altair,” he said. Then he stood quietly as Malik looked at his body, obediently turning and spreading his legs when prompted. 

“Your clothes are going to be burned,” Malik said. “We’ll find you new ones, follow me.” He walked back over toward the wall with a motion that Altair should follow him. Rauf leaned down far enough that Malik could catch his arm with a running start and be pulled back over the wall. Altair took a moment to consider leaving his clothing and weapons behind before he came over and allowed himself to be pulled up.

\--

Kadar was sleeping when Malik found him tucked away under a table in one of the center most rooms. His baby-brother the genius had decided that this one location (out of all possible places) afforded him the best opportunity of survival in the event of an invasion. Malik didn’t question it (he had almost altogether stopped questioning Kadar after the world’s population slowly mutated into mindless cannibals). Malik kicked him and stepped out of the way as Kadar woke up with a start—grasping and kicking in every direction. 

“Someone came looking for you. Get up and come check him before Maria shoots him in the head.” Malik picked up the jacket Kadar wore any time he was forced to go beyond the ‘safe zone’ and handed it to him. Then he stood to the side and waited while Kadar fussed with and fastened the jacket so it afforded him maximum protection from potentially infectious bites. 

“I’m up, I’m ready,” Kadar said. But he was yawning all the way through the leaning-halls and out into the unforgiving glare of sunshine that made him squint. Malik took him to where Altair was sitting on what was once the backseat of a car with a tarp wrapped around his waist to offer him the very slightest of privacy. “He’s white,” Kadar said as soon as he was close enough to see Altair clearly. His shock was a squawk followed by an unbelieving stare at Malik. “Tourist?”

“Soldier,’ Malik said, “American. He said he came from the north and that he heard of some genius doctor. He hasn’t been bitten anywhere. So—do your thing.” He motioned forward at where Altair was sitting before going over to take his post. 

“American,” Kadar repeated. Then he put on a pleasant smile and stepped forward to where Altair had straightened up and was looking at Kadar with his full (less than entirely impressed) attention. “Hello.” Kadar’s English was nearly as good as Maria’s save for the noticeable accent. “I need you to show me your teeth—well, your gums.” He put his hands resolutely around his back and leaned in as Altair pulled his upper lip up to show the pink of his gums. “Your fingernails,” he said. Altair showed him his hands. “Ah, yes. Were you vaccinated?”

“No,” Altair said.

“Because nobody ever lies about that,” Maria snapped from where she stood on the lookout. She was caught between watching for moving bodies in the distance and training the rifle on the back of Altair’s head. 

“He doesn’t have the scar,” Malik pointed out. Everyone who had gotten the vaccine had a dimpled little scar in their arm. 

Kadar went around to look at Altair’s biceps and then straightened up. “He doesn’t have any obvious signs. You can stay—but there is a week period where you have to stay in quarantine. If you are still clean in a week we will show you the rest of the camp.” Then he looked around and back at Altair like he only just noticed he was naked. “Where are your clothes?”

“We’re burning them,” Malik said, “they were foul.”

The twitch at the corner of Altair’s mouth was the only indication he gave that he had understood the words Malik spoke. He stood—taller by nearly a foot than Kadar—and made his poor baby brother stare up at him in something like horror before Kadar took a step back and motioned at Malik. “He will show you were you will stay for a week.”

\--

The quarantine quarters were a poorly constructed set of bars, barbed wire and metal fencing that made up an attempt at a single cohesive whole. Altair went through the slatted door without protest but stood in the middle of it (still naked) with a curiously raised eyebrow that this terrible impersonation of a prison cell could actually hold anything. 

“Someone will be guarding you,” Malik said. He shut the door and shuffled one step to the side where he could see Altair clearly through the fencing. The man was already dragging the dusty mat away from the edge of the cage and digging out the tarp that was meant to be a blanket. “As soon as someone comes to relieve me I’ll get you something to eat and some clothes.”

“Thank you,” Altair said. He flopped back onto the mat and shook the tarp out twice before he pulled it up so high it covered his face. In only a matter of minutes he was asleep.

\--

Malik slept for the rest of the day, woke up and found something to eat before he returned to relieve Rauf from watching Altair. When he got there, Rauf said, “he’s just been sleeping all day.” Then he was off to find his own bit of dinner and the dubious comfort of his bed mat. 

The sun was setting, everything was cast in thick shadows but the air was whistling a cooling breath that was blessed relief after the heat of the day. Malik laid his jacket on the bench he was to spend the whole of the night on and gathered up a supply of burnable trash and stowed it in the box by the bench along with the matches. There was a bucket of water for them to share. 

“That kid from earlier,” Altair said when Malik had settled into place (at last). He spoke suddenly, the words coming out perfectly well-formed and not even in the slightest sleep-addled. He sat up as he spoke, pushed the tarp away from his face and the whole length of his naked body. “That was the genius doctor that they told me about?”

“Kadar is a genius but he did not finish his schooling to become a doctor. He was interrupted by the epidemic.” Malik pushed the pile of clothes that he had brought hours-earlier toward the open slats of the door where Altair would be easily able to reach through and take them. The food that he had brought had gone cold and stale but had thankfully been left untouched. “He is also somewhat paranoid so while everyone else dismissed the symptoms he correctly guessed where it would lead.” 

Altair plucked the clothes up and shook them out, turned them a few times before he figured out how to put on a T-shirt and pulled it over his head. The pants were loose at his waist and short on his legs but he wore them without comment. “What are the symptoms of turning into a zombie?”

“He does not like the term ‘zombie’.”

“Yeah well, I don’t like it either but if you’ve got a more accurate description of what’s happened to most of the people you let me know.” He sat next to the fencing and reached through to pick up the beaten-old water bottle and pulled it through before gulping it greedily.

“The gums and fingernails change color first, there are cognitive signs and then physical ones. People forget how to read and speak, they take a long time to focus on objects and even longer to react to them. Sometimes there’s a marked lack of response to painful stimuli. During the last forty eight hours, all physical coordination and agility start to break down. Why do you speak Arabic?”

“My father,” Altair said. He did not elaborate and the clipped-and-short way he answered must have been meant to stall out any further attempts at the conversation. “How long does it take to get from discolored fingernails to flesh-eating zombie?”

“About a month,” Malik said. “From infection to discolored fingernails or gums is about a week. It doesn’t matter if they bite you if you haven’t had the vaccine. You can safely carry the virus but if you’ve had the vaccine you can’t contract the virus.”

“Have you had it?” Altair asked.

“No,” Malik said, “I haven’t had either. You are American?”

Altair nodded. He was reaching through the fence to pull cold-and-slimy handfuls of stew out of the cracked bowl. His face was a mess with the bits of it that missed his mouth and his hand was a disgusting disaster of dirt, stew and spit but it didn’t seem to bother him at all. “You from here?” he asked between one mouthful and the next.

“Not exactly here, but yes from this country. There is a spoon.”

“I haven’t eaten in two days,” Altair said. He was already running his fingers along the bottom of the bowl wiping up the very last congealed brown gunk and greedily slurping it off his fingers. When he was satisfied he had gotten all there was to get he took his time licking the taste of food off his fingers. “So, you’re just going to sit here the whole night?”

“Yes,” Malik said. “I will be quiet if you want to rest.” He had expected Altair to deny that he needed any further rest but he just nodded his understanding and went back to his bed. 

\--

Maria replaced him in the morning. She came with a stack of books, a handgun, a knife and a pillow to make the bench ever so slightly more comfortable. Malik went gratefully away from the mind-numbing boredom of keeping watch over someone that did absolutely nothing interesting. After he found a bit of food, he fell asleep to dreams of nothingness save for the distant screech of undead things.

\--

Kadar found him when the day was too-hot to sleep through. He came like a puddle of sweat, adding heat to the room that was already past the point of bearable. There was a nervous twitch in his left hand that meant he’d been _thinking_ again (always thinking). They were a host of ten (now eleven) strong-bodies that were growing steadily leaner on limited food stores. But the number of infected had increased around them like an ever tightening knot.

“They are probably starving by now,” Kadar said. His voice was faraway-from-here, wrapped up tight in the many-things a genius spent his days thinking about. He said, “they have to be starving by now. Everyone says that they don’t eat one another and that makes sense because the meat is bad, it’s rotting away from the bone. They only eat fresh things and the rate with which they consume, it’s a wonder they haven’t all died out from starvation before now. There’s such a limited supply. They don’t have enough coordination to hunt so they have to rely on surprise and luck. Some of them will be driven away from the clusters of population, they’ll search for some new food source—if one of them comes, more will follow.”

Malik rubbed the sweat-and-sleep away from his eyes and sat up enough to see his brother’s paranoia-white face more clearly. The trouble with thinking (always thinking) was that it led you to the darkest holes where light couldn’t possibly shine. There was no hope where Kadar’s brain wandered but the oppressive clutch of _fact_. “You said they would all be dead in a year. We only have to make it seven more months.”

“We only have enough food for three,” Kadar said. “We have to go out to forage for more and any time we leave we raise the risk that _they_ will find us. If one of them finds us, they all find us.” 

“Kadar,” Malik said. He put his hands on Kadar’s shoulders to hold him steady and waited until his brother finally looked him in the eye. His face was flushed pink and still pale, like his lips that looked as if they’d been bitten to the point of bleeding and the wide-wild cast of his eyes just before he managed to look at Malik instead of the walls around them. “We will survive this.”

There was only the slightest of smiles on his brother’s face when he said, “no, _you_ will survive this Malik.” But I won’t, Kadar did not say. _I’ve done the math and I know the truth, there is almost no way I survive this apocalypse and the inevitability of my own death haunts me every moment of every single day._

Malik hugged him because there was no reason that would get through to Kadar, nothing to be said or done that would break this panic that caught in his chest. He could only hug him and hold him with tight arms and firm hands in the hope that the madness would pass and his brother would come back together again.

\--

“The animal needs a bath,” was what Maria said to him when he came to take her place at the quarantine cell. Altair put his middle finger up at her as she walked away but he otherwise did not look away from the book he was reading. It was in English (something Malik was bad at on good days) and looked thick and uninteresting. 

Malik stood next to the cell for a moment and then retrieved the key for the lock on the door. “We have a well,” Malik said. “The water is very cold but you would benefit from a bath.” He picked up the handgun that Maria left for him and tucked it into a spare pocket. Altair looked at the gun (not at his face). 

“Your friend is charming,” Altair said when he was following Malik out to the well. 

“Maria is not charming,” Malik said. “But she is very good at her job. That is more important considering what’s happened.” He picked up the bucket to hand to Altair and then fetched the gummy bar of soap for him to use. He stood far enough away that he wouldn’t be splashed with the water but close enough he could clearly see Altair through the growing shadows.

(Close enough he could see the rise and slope of his arms, the tight definition of his abs, the clench of his thighs and the inviting curve of his—)

“If her job is being rude without reason than she is very good at it.” Altair threw his clothes over at Malik’s feet and dropped the bucket over the side of the well and used the rope to lift it out again. The effort made the muscles of his arms and back stand out even farther. Once the bucket was sitting on the ground, Altair cupped the water with his hands and spilled it over his skin with a uncomfortable little hiss at the coolness. He lathered the soap on his body and stood up to his full height before he poured the water over his chest, shoulders and back. It ran down to the ground in a rush of sudsy little bubbles as Altair shivered and bit back curses. “Fuck,” he said as he threw the bucket back down into the well. “I think I’d rather be dirty.”

But his skin was darker without the pale dirt covering it. He wasn’t as sickly looking as his body went all pink beneath the brown of his tanned skin. Altair grit his teeth before he poured some of the water over his head and used the bar of soap to wash it clean. When he was done he came across the ground on tip-toes and pulled his clothes on so quickly it was amazing they did not tear apart. 

“Much better,” Malik said.

Altair made a dismissive noise. When they got back to the cell he wrapped the tarp around his still-shivering body and sat cross-legged by the fence wall as he ate his stew with the same enthusiasm as the day before. (It really was not good enough to deserve enthusiasm.) “Is she rude to everyone?”

“Why does this matter to you?” Malik asked.

“Because she sits by my—cage—with a gun in her lap while she looks down at me and sees no reason not to inform me how much she dislikes my presence. I’d like to know if I should be concerned or if it’s just the way she is.” He used his fingers to lick the bowl shiny-and-clean before he set it down again. 

“It’s just the way she is. I think it is because she has had the vaccine. Kadar doesn’t know—nobody knew before this—how long the virus can last outside of a host body. Can you imagine waking up every day worrying that the very air around you could bring the end of your life?” 

“No.” He was looking out toward the last long slants of sunlight that washed up inside of his drafty cell. There was an undefined untruth in the sound of his voice and a clear lie sitting on his shoulders that made his posture seem too-rigid-and-too-tight. “Maria said you were a laborer before this. How did you end up with guard duty?”

“I learned how to shoot a gun, how to use a knife. I haven’t been vaccinated which makes it safer for me than it is for them. What is your book about?” Malik asked. Because everything was worse at night and his brother’s worry had wormed its way under Malik skin.

Altair picked it up and grimaced at it before he opened it again. “Man versus Man, redemption story. It’s garbage.” But he fell into reading it with his body hunched over toward the very last of the dim light.

\--

Malik made a fire when it was too dark to see anything beyond the tip of his nose. It smoked heavily at first, filled the little space with a heavy-black-stink before it cleared out and the flames grew tall and fat as they ate away at the bits of garbage. Altair had put his book down and was doing one arm push-ups alternating arms. He had taken his shirt off before he started so Malik could see every sleek line of his body as it glowed golden by firelight. Altair seemed far too absorbed in the task to notice Malik’s rapt attention (and probably for the best).

“Were you named after the star?” Malik asked.

“What?” Altair asked.

“Your name. Were you named for the star?” 

Altair sat back on his knees and gave him the strangest look. He was too old to be honestly shocked by the question—it was just unthinkable that he’d gone so long in his life without someone having mentioned the star to him—but he cleared his throat like quietly dismissing the question. “No. I mean, I don’t know. My Grandmother told me that my Mom had decided what to name me. So maybe that’s why. I just know nobody ever says it or my last name right; it used to make my father _furious_ , but then he died so I guess it matters less now.”

“What is your last name?” Malik asked.

“Ibn-La’Ahad.”

Malik snorted. “Americans. What do they call you if they cannot pronounce your name?”

“Lad. A lot of things but when they actually try my name it’s just Lad.” He shifted up to his feet and started doing squats. “Is there anything special about my star?” Altair was looking right at him now, with a faint half-smile on his face whenever Malik tried very hard to look at anything but at the way Altair’s body moved.

“It’s very bright.” But that was all Malik remembered, maybe all he’d ever known about the star. He couldn’t swear that he’d ever been afforded the opportunity to read that much for himself or if he’d picked it up from the many-many things that his brother had babbled on and on about when they were younger. “I think it has something to do with an eagle.” 

By then Altair had smoothly transitioned into jumping jacks. The sweat on his skin made him shine in the limited light. He was not smiling now, or looking at Malik (not directly) so it seemed safe enough to watch him.

\--

Rauf took Maria’s place for the daytime shift. Malik went to check on his brother and found him sleeping in a defensive ball. He fell asleep to uneasy thoughts of starvation. But Malik woke up in the heat of day with a thick sweat covering his body and a painfully hard erection. His head was spinning with thoughts of Altair’s stupid body moving as fluidly as any seasoned dancer. 

Malik jerked off to deliciously deviant thoughts of what Altair’s body must feel like—how heavy and how smooth he would be stretched across Malik’s. How rough his hands would be when they scraped across his skin. Of how his mouth would feel pressed against Malik’s as he rubbed hungrily against him. Oh-and-if Altair were very good and very lucky Malik would allow the man to fuck him. 

He came to some imaginary Altair gasping in the singular pleasure of fucking Malik. Oh-and-it-was-so _good_.

\--

Altair slept most of the third night and woke up sometime before dawn looking irritated with himself for having slept at all. He relieved himself before he came over and flopped down against the fence between them. The fire had long-since gone out and the dawn had just started rising. “Morning,” he said.

“Good morning,” Malik said back.

Altair yawned and sat quietly looking out at the rising sun as it came over the walls and finally washed up across the ground to where he was sitting. The peaks and knots of his short hair were standing up all around the left side of his head where sleep-and-sweat must have all but glued them in place and he scratched at the darkening stubble on his jaw before he looked at Malik with blurry-half-open eyes. “I had a nice dream about you,” he said. A satisfied-sort-of-smile came across his face that seemed out of place through the fence-wall of a poorly constructed prison cell. His voice was sleep-roughed when he said, “I woke up because I couldn’t figure out if you were the same color under your clothes.”

Malik laughed at that (didn’t even mean to) and Altair’s smile shifted to a grin that looked almost like relief. “That does not seem like a good enough reason to interrupt a dream you were enjoying.”

“Details are important,” Altair said, “think of all the people you’ve had sex with—think of the little things you remember about them. Where their skin is rough, the smell of their deodorant, the sounds they made just before they had an orgasm. Besides, you’ve seen me naked, you don’t have to exercise very much imagination.”

“You assume that I dream about you,” Malik said.

Oh-and-the smugness on Altair’s face was enough to make a sane man consider murder. Because he was oh-so-sure of himself and oh-so-doubtful of Malik’s weak objections. “Do you dream about me, Malik?”

Maria was on her way, crossing from the sleeping quarters with a deeply surly look on her face. There was time enough to affirm or deny Altair’s question with words but Malik found himself sliding up to his feet and catching the button of his long shirt, pulling it up and hitching the waistband of his pants down to show the tanned skin of his belly and hip. It was a dirty-lick-of-something he’d almost lost in mad dash of survival. His face was pink and his voice was a curious cough when he said good morning to Maria.

“Sleep well, sweet dreams,” Altair called after him.

\--

There was a momentary reprieve from the heat that allowed Malik to manage a decent seven hours of a sleep before he found himself awake again. He laid on his bed mat thinking about nothing-at-all (not the way the world had come to an end, not the shortage of food that was steadily making every bite he ate feel he was eating himself to an early death, not his brother) until he found himself thinking about Altair. That devolved rapidly into dirty sexual fantasies (about the man’s long-lithe body and his smug-fucking smile) so that by the time he got out of bed, he had to visit the well to wash himself clean again. 

Kadar was awake (at least) when Malik went to invite him to get something to eat with him. The room was a disaster of papers covered in desperate scribbles that meant that Kadar had been _thinking_ again. He was sitting in the center of the room with the last few precious sheets of blank paper sitting in front of him and a pen held tight in his fist. “We have to go get food,” he said.

“I was going to ask you that,” Malik said. He was going for light-hearted, perhaps even cheerful, but Kadar just looked at him like he had spoken some foreign language. “I’ll go,” he said.

“You can’t go alone. The new man is a soldier. He has been out in the world recently so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows somewhere to go that is most likely to have useful supplies. As soon as we’re sure he’s not infected, you can go out with him and bring us back what we need to survive.” Then he rubbed at his hair just behind his left ear (an old nervous habit) and picked through his papers. “I’ve figured out what we’ll need to make it through the next few months. You won’t be able to carry it all at once—it’s inconceivable. But if you can get at least some of it we can make it a little while longer.”

Malik stepped forward, crouched in front of his brother and reached out to take his hand and pull it away from his hair. Kadar was so-damn-young and so bright-eyed-even now. There was something innocent at the core of his brother’s being that made Malik feel tired and old. “I will get food, Kadar. We will survive.”

Oh-and-that dear little smile, the same smile Kadar had when he was only a little boy. 

\--

Altair was sleeping when Malik took over watching him. He woke up in the grayness of the sunset and stretched sleep out of his limbs. They ignored one another as Altair ate with customary rudeness (with his _fingers_ ) and then got up and did a few laps around his small enclosure before he settled in a forming dip against the fence to watch Malik light a fire to see by. He was acutely aware of being watched and wondered at the difference it made. His hands (normally steady, almost bored at repeating this same task) were shaky and unreliable. He was aware of the sweat on his brow, the unwashed smell of his own clothes and body since he’d elected not to bathe in the frigid water of the well today. The rough hair on his face and the thick-unruly curl of his hair made him self-conscious in a curious way that had him trying to figure out if he should bother to try to flatten his hair with his hand.

“Did you build this place?” Altair asked. 

It was not the question Malik expected, so it took a breath-too-long to answer it smoothly. “There was one home, we built everything else—the other rooms, the walls. There used to be many of us but they all began to turn. Kadar taught everyone to recognize the signs and we check one another once a week to be sure that nobody is turning.” He shrugged at the words, “except me. I was not vaccinated. So they watch me constantly for the signs of the virus because if I get ill they could all turn into one of those things.”

“A zombie,” Altair said.

“I don’t like that word.” It seemed unreal, as if they had been transported into some alternate world where things like _zombies_ were even possible. That human beings could be changed into undead-things driven to arousal by the smell of fresh-living meat. Whatever had happened to the people he once know, Malik would rather not think of them as something so unbelievable as _zombies_.

“I thought it was your brother who didn’t,” Altair said quietly. “Maria told me that the food is going to run out. She made sure to mention it twice while I ate lunch as if it would change my mind about being hungry.”

“She did not want to let you in to start with. The food is running out. We have a few months left before the rations will not be enough to support everyone that is here. If we add any more people, the amount of time we have left lessens. Soon, someone will have to go out and find food.” Malik dropped a bit of trash into the fire and watched it smoke and pop before going still. He said, “is it terrible out there? Are there very many of them?”

“There are more than enough. But depending on where you go there are more survivors than zombies. They stick together, move quickly and most of them make it for a while. The zombies can’t climb, the key is to find somewhere high to hide.” He waved his hand at Malik and his dislike of the word. Then he let out a sigh and leaned his forehead against the fence. 

Malik leaned back into his seat. He could tell Altair the mission he had accepted on the man’s behalf but the fragile quiet between them seemed too easily broken. He wanted some sense of peace, wanted even the illusion of a forming friendship to fend off the unwanted things that crawled and crept everywhere beyond the imagined safety of this small fire’s flickering glow. So he said nothing. They sat in silence for some time before Altair stood up and stripped off his shirt again. It fell in a heap on his bed mat as he stretched his arms over his head with his back turned to Malik. 

“Did you dream of me today?” Malik asked. 

Altair turned back around to look at him and smiled as he continued stretching. “I did. How old are you?”

“Twenty four,” Malik said. “Does that matter?”

“You have a young face,” Altair said, “your brother’s face is much younger than yours. I would have thought he was a child if I had met him before. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. I guessed you were probably twenty at least.”

“Are you trying to guess my age or make some estimation of my innocence?” He had never been told that he had a ‘young face’ before. Most people that met him assumed he was far older than he really was. His mother had been especially fond of telling him that he had always been an old man trapped in some young man’s body. It was her justification when she pushed him but coddled his brother. 

“Both. I’m twenty four too,” Altair said. He stood there for a moment, conspicuous shirtless with his arms hanging at his sides uneasily. “I’m not innocent. I’m assuming you’re using innocent to talk about sexual experience. I mean, I’m not innocent no matter what you mean.”

“None of us are innocent anymore,” Malik said. (But he didn’t think of the men who’s bodies he had buried out beyond the wall, the ones who had died with bullets in their heads after Malik-had-shot them. He did not often think of them anymore.) 

Altair nodded his agreement and then dropped down to start his nightly push-ups. Malik watched him because there was simply no reason not to. 

\--

Day five brought him shuffling back to the side of Altair’s quarantined confinement with a yawn heavy in his throat. They did not talk much, save for when Altair had a question that interrupted Malik’s attempts to fall asleep. 

“Didn’t sleep?”

Malik grunted at the question and the very much unwanted interruption of his precious sleep. He stretched and yawned, tried to convince his body that it did not require any further rest and found himself slumping gratefully back in place. “My brother asked me to go find food—you insist on using the word ‘zombie’. I had nightmares that I did not enjoy about creatures with their mouths full of my flesh.” 

“You should have dreamed of me,” Altair said, “you should try it now.”

“Mm,” Malik murmured agreeably. “I don’t need sleep.” He opened his eyes far enough to see Altair pulling his shirt off. “I’m not sure thinking about you would make me sleepy, exactly.” 

“Give me two days and I’ll rock you to sleep,” Altair said. 

Malik snorted at that presumption and the confidence that made the words into a filthy promise. He found himself waking up stiff and sore just before dawn to find Altair curled up in a ball against the edge of the fence. He looked ridiculous in the fetal position with his pants legs pulled up to his knees and his shirt sleeves tucked up to his elbows. His hair was a dirty tuft sticking straight up and his breathing was so even and so quiet that it nearly lulled Malik back into a heavy sleep. 

When Maria came to take his place, if she noticed the sleep in his eyes she said nothing at all.

\--

“Rauf is taking the night shift,” Maria told him sometime after the afternoon heat drove him from pretending to rest in his room to search for anything that would satiate the hunger in his belly. Rations had been cut from comfortable again and his body was revolting against the constant hunger these new portions brought. She looked aggravated at having to find and tell him the information and even more hassled at the way his face surely betrayed his disappointment at the words. 

“Who is watching the wall?”

“Not you,” she said. “Your brother said that you needed to rest so he doesn’t want you doing anymore night duty.” Then she gave him a derisive sort of look as she said, “but you know, the animal gets set free tomorrow. So it’s not like you’ve got very long to wait.”

“Bitch,” Malik said.

Her smile was so-very-sweet. “But at least I’m a _useful_ bitch.” Then she was walking away from him. “You can eat my share if you want, the smell of that thing turns my stomach.” 

There was no almost not containing the rage that turned his hands to fists and had his teeth grinding so hard together he thought he could hear them cracking in his jaw. When she was gone from view he kicked the table they sometimes ate around and had to stand there with panting breaths choking in his throat until he could _think_ again.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heed the suicide warning.

\--&\--

Altair could have dismantled the ‘cell’ in less time than it took for the exhausted-and-disinterested day shift to react to his movement. Even Maria who seemed to hate him in a much more active fashion than the others could have cared less if he dug his way under the fence with the spoon they sometimes gave him to eat with. She might have looked at him with ever so slightly more pity than she already did but she wouldn’t have shot him. He was, ultimately, not worth her time.

There was nothing amusing about the fact that Malik (the only one that seemed to appreciate his presence) was the only one that would have tried to stop him from escaping. Malik who watched him with avid attentiveness that only sometimes had to do with preventing his escape. 

He stayed where they put him only because he wanted a safe place to stay for a few weeks. There was a herd of zombies following at his heels, moving like a great migrating force as it ate its way through the survivors. Altair had not lied to Malik—survival was possible and there were still plenty of humans left squatting in sordid little hovels as they prayed their way through the apocalypse. But they were starving, filthy and frightened with no necessary tools to aid their survival. (Not so unlike these people here, not so very unlike them at all.)

\--

Altair had grown up in a war zone of human emotion—seen his father slobbering and drunk sobbing over his mother and his lost family and all the many things that he’d never have again. And he’d seen his Grandmother grow bitter and brittle with every passing year that her beloved daughter was gone and this ungodly little beast with its father’s skin took her place. His father killed himself (in the end) but the last few weeks of his living-breath had been spent hunched over with a look of far-away concentration turning his face into a mask of something that looked like peace. Altair remembered his silence far better than he remembered his father-and-grandmother’s endless shouting that preceded it. That silence had been so very welcome to a little boy’s ears. (Oh yes, he remembered that too, remembered that his father broke down in pieces and all Altair could be bothered to feel was _gratitude_.)

Altair had been five years old when he found his father swinging in the garage, and his Grandmother had been two minutes behind him and far too late to save him from a life lived with the knowledge of his father’s bloated face and stiffened legs. She had screamed, had covered Altair’s face and dragged him backward out of the room as she kicked the door shut. She swung him around and pushed him against the pantry door hard enough it jostled the knob loud enough it popped in his ear (he remembered that too, that metallic clang so loud so close to his ear) but it was too little-too-late when she said, ‘why didn’t you come get me, why didn’t you say something. Why didn’t you _scream_?’

Altair hadn’t ever answered her. That he remembered the way he remembered the tears in her eyes. The way her eyes were puffy and swollen and snot was slipping out of her tender-thin nose before she pulled him up against her chest and held him there. She smelled like Avon perfume (on sale this month, she always said) and dryer sheets. Her skin was soft and thin and he dug his fingers into her fine-soft clothes as the creaking sway of his father’s body kept steady time just beyond the door.

\--

Maria left early, the man with one missing eye took her place and fell asleep as soon as he found some comfortable place on the bench. Altair slept with him because the day was hot as hell and there was nothing better to do. He expected to wake up to Malik—thought about what he was going to say to him when he did come—and found the kid genius sitting outside of his cell with a pitiful little flame struggling to survive just beyond the tips of his terribly-practical boots.

Altair shuffled over, stuck his fingers through the fence and held onto it. All that he’d heard about the kid was the sort of stuff that people built religions on. He had walked through a dozen decimated villages, picked through the survivors hiding as high off the ground as they could manage as they told him in hushed-whispers about the fragile hope that they only had to survive a few more months. The kid-genuis-doctor had come through months ago and told them all to prepare, to hide, to arm themselves against the horde. But Kadar, in reality, was just a fucking _kid_ so much younger than Altair could have imagined.

“My brother likes you,” Kadar said to him without looking at him. The words were crisp-perfect Arabic. The flak jacket he wore was heavy on his slim shoulders and pulled tight at his wrists when Kadar stood up. He wasn’t even as tall as Malik, and stood just under Altair’s chin but there was defiance in his thin-face when he looked up at him. 

“I like to think I’m likeable.”

Kadar did not laugh, he didn’t smile. He did not react to the words in any way at all. No, he cleared his throat and said, “you were a soldier.”

“ _Was_ being the most important point.”

Then Kadar turned back and picked up a stack of papers, he lifted them up, pressed them against the fence so Altair could see the endless scrawl of writing interspersed here and there with a mess of numbers. It didn’t mean anything to him and he almost said as much but Kadar interrupted him. “I am not a soldier; I am a genius. I have been more intelligent than my brother the whole of my life the same way he has been stronger than me. There are things I know that I could not begin to explain to him—things that he could never understand, not even for all of his trying. I have worked through this problem, I have plotted it with every possible outcome and arrived at the same conclusion every time. It is simple math, really. I am going to contract the virus and _change_.”

“You can’t know that,” Altair said.

“I can,” Kadar said. “The way I knew what the vaccine and the virus were going to do when they combined. The way I knew where to hide to avoid the creatures when they turned. I know what he does not know: this was never about _my_ survival. I was dead the minute the vaccine was pumped into my arm and all the time I’ve lived since this is simply borrowed time.” He dropped the papers into the fire behind him and the light grew bright-for-a-moment. It caught on the gaunt lines of his face and the dim blue of his eyes. His hair was the same black as his brothers and his skin was the same rich-tan, it was only his eyes that were so very different.

“I’ve known a lot of men living on borrowed time that did just fine,” Altair said. There was a dread in the center of his chest that was working its way down to his gut. “Where is Malik?”

“Concentrate,” Kadar said just like he was an ignorant child. “This is very important. The problem is not that I will die, but trying to work out how to die that relieves my brother of the responsibility of my death. I have no doubt of his ability to kill me if I turn—he wouldn’t want me to suffer—but the grief and guilt of that would lessen his chances of survival. I could just as easily be killed by any other person in our camp and he would rage injustice at them before he left and his anger would lessen his chances of survival. I have wracked my brain for a method that increases his chances.”

“How about not dying? Where is Malik?” Altair asked.

Kadar waved a hand at the stupidity of that suggestion. “As it turned out, Maria was the one who provided the vital clue. She’s very clever, you know. More clever than I gave her credit for. She told me all my brother needed to survive was another person. And she isn’t wrong—my brother is what you would call a ‘caretaker’ he likes to be responsible for another person’s wellbeing because it gives him purpose in his life. He flounders when he has nobody to look out for. Without me, he has nobody. I pointed this out and Maria countered with _you_.” Here Kadar stopped (not for his benefit) but with a look of confused anger-and-revulsion before it settled into something like contempt when he looked at Altair. “You’ll have to forgive me for finding your sexual orientation an affront to nature. If I had time to work through my feelings, I’m sure that I’d arrive at the conclusion that you were a good person and that the cultural bias against homosexuality that’s dictating my disgust for you was nonsensical at best. I don’t have the luxury of that time so I’ve decided to exclude that information from my decision. My brother is fond of you and I don’t care about the reason for it. He would accept you.”

“What are you going to do?” Altair asked. (Oh but he knew, didn’t he? He knew the look in Kadar’s face. He knew the calm that made his every motion seem heavy-and-thick and oh-so-very peaceful. Altair had seen this all before.) “Fuck you,” he said in the next second. “Where’s Malik?”

“I just said we’re excluding that,” Kadar snapped at him. The anger in his features smoothed out again before he spoke. “Tomorrow, you will spend the day with my brother securing his affections. The day after Malik will tell you that, since you are the only two people here who escaped vaccination, you will be going out to retrieve food. The journey alone will take you days, scouting and locating food and carrying it back will take several more days. By the time you return, everything will be done.”

Altair kicked the fence and it rattled the whole of the prison cell. “Fuck you,” he snapped again, “I am not taking your brother out for a walk while you kill yourself!”

Kadar blinked at him as if he did not understand a single word that Altair had said. (Maybe he hadn’t, maybe the words had ripped out of his chest in some language this genius boy couldn’t figure out.) His sigh was the last grasp of his will to live as the calm broke on his shoulders and he was really nothing-at-all but a little boy who had gotten so far in over his head he couldn’t see a way out. “Please understand me,” he said evenly, “this is going to happen. Every person in this camp understands that there is no escape for us. This virus will find its way to us—through the air, through the creatures that carry it, through the very food we are sending you out to find. Everywhere is infected. As soon as we contract the virus, we are dead. The thing I cannot expect my brother to understand is that it is _my_ right to decide how to die. I am _not_ going to wait for the virus to find me. I am _not_ going to die after my humanity has been stripped away from me.”

Altair wanted to hit him but he shook the fence between them with all the violence he couldn’t unleash on Kadar. It was enough to make the boy flinch away from him, enough to bring something like fear to his passive face and it was enough to make Altair sag backward. “You can’t expect him to understand but you think I will?”

“I think when given the option between telling Malik what I have planned and forcing him to stay here and watch us die and keeping your mouth shut and ‘taking him for a walk’, you’ll choose the most humane option.”

“Maybe I’ll tell him and he’ll stop you,” Altair said.

“It’s too late to stop me now,” Kadar said, “I’ve already poisoned them. I’ve already poisoned myself. It will take a few days because the poison is weak but there is plenty of it. It will grow stronger every time we ingest it so even if you tell him now—it won’t stop us.”

“You asshole.” Altair’s body was sagging in on itself, his forehead was pressed against his knuckles so he was looking right at Kadar’s face. His eyes were clear and bright still, his living body was full of all of the contained possibility of human life. 

“I am. Everything I have done in the past six months has only ever been to secure my brother’s survival. All of the fears I have told him, all of the instability I’ve manifested, all these people I’ve collected and all of the skills Maria and the others have taught him serve on one single purpose. My brother has never lied to me, you must understand, because he believes truth is more important than the vague comfort of a lie. What I have done to him is unforgiveable. What I will do to him when he returns to my corpse is an inconceivable wound. That is why I am giving him to you. A thousand, maybe a million, individual decisions brought us to this moment. Think of them now, think of all of the choices you made that brought you _here_ and each one of them makes _me_ more certain that you are the one that I have been waiting for.” But Kadar didn’t need his permission, he didn’t need Altair to agree that he was convinced destiny brought them to this moment. Kadar didn’t need anything as trivial and transient as that. 

“I’ll keep him alive,” Altair said. 

Kadar nodded and a smile crossed his face. “Thank you, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad.” And for once, it was his name exactly as it was meant to be said. 

\--

Altair spent the night pacing. His body was sore from hurt that had nothing to do with the hard ground, the foul-tasting food or the exertion that had kept him from resting the whole of the night. His body hurt with the screams he had never bothered to utter before and the phantom feeling of his Grandmother’s talon-like hands digging into his arms. 

When he collapsed, it was just before dawn. He slept because he could not keep his body awake a moment longer.

\--

Oh-but-Malik was standing outside of the door when he woke up. Malik was looking down and to the left, trying to act like he hadn’t been watching Altair. “Kadar told me you were free to go, I’ve come to show you where you’re going to be sleeping.

“Close to you, I hope,” Altair said. He climbed to his feet and shook the dust off his shirt before he went through the open door. There was a brief moment of awkward closeness before Malik moved far enough away he wasn’t in danger of touching Altair (accidentally). Altair thought about asking for a brief detour to the well and shrugged the notion away. It was mid-afternoon by now and there were more than enough eyes already following them as they walked. 

“You are very direct. Does that work for you often?” Malik asked. He showed Altair the way across the flat-dusty ground to the door that led them into a dim-quiet hall that was constructed so poorly sunlight broke through it in patches. 

“It works well enough. The only times I’ve ever had sex are because of my directness. I don’t see any reason to be coy.” He followed Malik obediently. (But he didn’t think of Kadar.) “If you don’t like it I guess I could try being less direct.”

Malik stopped at a doorway covered with a curtain and held it open as he motioned Altair inside. The interior was darker than the hallway, the walls seemed sturdier and there was only one or two holes in the roof to let sunlight in like flashlight beams. Altair was halfway to turning around and saying something (suave, of course) when Malik stepped up to him with his left arm around Altair’s neck and his right hand pulling Altair by the jaw into a firm kiss. It was _so eager_ it was nearly giggle inducing.

(If Altair were a man of superior quality he would have pushed Malik away, he would have given him some excuse about why they couldn’t. Something like I-know-what-your-brother-is-planning.) 

Altair kissed him back, grabbed Malik by the dusty clothes and walked them backward until Malik was against a rickety wall with his head tipped back against the crook of Altair’s elbow around his shoulders. There were hands under his clothes, touching his sides and his back before pushing down through the waistband of his laughably ill-fitting pants and squeezing his ass. 

“You’re very direct,” Altair said. Malik kissed him again as he blindly stripped Altair’s pants off. Altair pulled Malik’s clothes apart until the whole of his body was naked and arching against his.

They rutted against one another like horny teenagers, fully aware of the ridiculous nature of their hips bumping together. Malik sucked on his neck, pushed them to the ground and spread his legs across Altair’s thighs as he ground his dick against Altair’s belly and kissed him so deep-and-wet. 

After, when they were damp and sticky and sated, Malik lay at his side with a nervous pant of breath. “That is not what I have been thinking about. I couldn’t seem to stop.”

“Well, it’s not like it’s the last time we can ever have sex,” Altair said. He-was-tired and Malik-was-yawning so he rolled them into spooning and pulled the single blanket up to cover most (if not all) of their nakedness.

\--

They woke up in a puddle of sweat. Malik elbowed him in the ribs, rolled onto his back and blinked at him a few times before he seemed to understand what he was looking at. Altair lifted himself up onto his elbow and looked down at Malik as he stretched out under him. The blanket slid away and they were gloriously naked again. 

Malik was coated in sweat that mixed with the dusty dirt caught in all of the creases of his skin and it mixed together to make odd swirls and hand-prints where Altair had touched him. His cheeks were pink with confused bravado as Altair looked at him—the too-thin set of his face, the scruff caught on his cheeks. The tender skin of his neck where the dirt had settled the thickest to the dip in his collarbone where sweat had pooled. His shoulders were set broad but thinned out by months-of-not-quite enough food (or maybe a whole life before that). He had the muscles of a work-horse though. His skin was rough and sun-darkened with subtle lines where it faded lighter under the clothes he must have worn to work in. His chest was covered in sparse but coarse black hair that had gone flat against his sweating skin. It went down his belly, trailed into a well-defined line. 

“You have very intense eyes,” Malik said. His hand caught Altair by the jaw again (a habit, it seemed) to pull him away from looking at his hardening dick and the inviting part of his muscular thighs. (What a pretty sight the combination of the two did make.) “Before, you spoke of details. What details are you going to remember me by?”

(Your brother’s blue eyes and the look of triumph in his face when I agreed to let him die.) 

Altair moved up, lifted himself so he could put his knees between Malik’s thighs. He sat back on his knees and looked at Malik as the blush on his cheeks spread down his neck to the tops of his shoulders. He didn’t flinch away from the attention but he must have been a squirming mess on the inside. “I’ll remember you voice in my ear—full of hot breath and dropped syllables. I’ll remember the feel of your rough cheeks when they rubbed against mine. And the faded tan lines that run across your arms,” he touched one with his finger. “I’ll remember the taste of your neck: salt and old dirt.”

Malik slapped him for that, left a pink imprint across his thigh that barely even stung enough to notice. “You taste the same. Salt and dirt and poor manners.”

“My Grandmother lamented over my manners for years. She’d be proud I found someone in the world to takeover where she left off.” Altair put his hands on Malik’s knees, slid them down through the hair on his thighs toward his hips. He moved slowly, stretching the moment into an infinity of seconds as he waited for Malik to push him away (if he wanted to).

“I’m surprised you have not found more people to be appalled. Maybe things are very different in America.” For all that Malik blushed with uneasy pinkness when Altair looked at him, his body moved into the touch of his hands with a fluid eagerness that might have been embarrassing if it weren’t so fucking hot. “Was she alive before this started?” Malik asked.

Altair shook his head. “No, she died a few years ago. I think she only stayed alive so long to be sure I wasn’t going to turn into psychopath. When I joined the military she sat in her room and cried for two days. Everyone told me that it was because she was afraid I was going to die but it wasn’t. She cried because she knew I could kill people in the military and nobody would think badly of her because of it.” 

“At least she didn’t have to be alive for this,” Malik said. (Hopefully he did not mean sex but the zombies.) “At least she did not have to worry if you were still alive or if you had turned into one of those foul things.” But his own words were slipping into silence as he lifted himself up using only one elbow and the strength of his abs. He pulled Altair down with a loose grip on his shoulders. “We were doing well before.”

Altair smiled against Malik’s own hopeful smile. His hand slid down to rub against Malik’s hardening dick with just enough pressure to make him draw in a quick breath. “I think we could do better if we tried.”

Oh-and Malik kissed him with two legs wrapped around his body and one hand pressed against his fast-beating heart. 

\--

But reality still existed. It followed Altair like kitten-steps from the curtain of Malik’s little room to the muddy dirt by the well where he drew a bucket full of ice water and started scrubbing his dirty arms and chest. He felt _filthy_ in a way that wasn’t entirely physical. It did not stop him from scrubbing his arms until they were red with irritation—bleeding where his skin had started to crack from the abuse of constant dirt and little water. He scrubbed his face, washed his hair and stripped out of his pants to wash the rest of his body. 

It was Maria (not Kadar) that found him. She wasn’t carrying the rifle she’d greeted him with. She was not even carrying a handgun or a knife. When she stopped next to him at the well there was the very slightest of pink smiles on her wan lips that did nothing at all to offer reassurances. The skin under her eyes had started to darken and her skin had started to turn sallow. She came to him dressed like a woman of leisure—wearing some breezy dress that looked out of place in the center of an apocalypse—in place of the practical pants and shirt she had always worn before. 

He was scrubbing the inside of his thighs when she came to him so he sneered at her and the presumptive way she eyed his naked body. “I hear that you’re the one I get to thank for this shit storm,” he said.

Her slim shoulders lifted and then dropped like it didn’t matter. Then she reached down to pull her skirt out to the side and shake it a little. “Do you like this? In my life before I was many things—good things, bad things—mostly bad things. I had many skills that gave me a tactical advantage over people who thought little of a pretty woman. I was in this country to kill a man, this was my cover.”

“You don’t get to be my friend now,” Altair said, “you don’t get to ask me for sympathy or pity or anything at all but tolerant contempt.”

Maria didn’t smile at him. She let the skirt fall back against her legs and pulled a fresh bucket of water up from the well for him. The effort put a splatter of wet drops across her dress that made it cling here-and-there to her skin underneath. “I’m going to be dead in two days.”

Altair turned his head away from her because if he looked at her half-a-second longer he would have punched her in the face. His eyes closed against the image of her shock and the pouring of her blood across her sickly-pale face. He ignored her as he dumped the water over his soapy-wet legs and stepped beyond the puddle to pull his pants on. 

“We have clothes that will fit you better. I’ve arranged for you to be given a sizeable portion of the weapons—discreetly of course. Look at me,” Maria said.

Altair looked at her, right at her. “Let me be very clear, so that you and that dickhead will understand this. I agreed to play along because of _him_ , because what you’re doing to him now is wrong on a level that I can’t begin to explain. You have every right in the world to do what you have to—I don’t disagree with you at all. I’ve seen what you’re going to become and it’s a fate far worse than death. Just because this,” he motioned at her body and the general surrounding, “is something you have to do, does not mean you had the right to drag me into it. Or that you have the right to send him away like some stupid child that can’t be trusted to understand.”

“Then tell him,” Maria said. “Please tell him. It won’t make a difference—Kadar took care of that. I convinced the genius that Malik needed you. Prove me right.” She smiled at the white rage in his knuckles and the bright-red anger on his face. Her hands were like ice when they touched his face and there was no resistance in her body when he slapped her arm away. “I’m not scared now,” she said to him. “It was overwhelming before. But I’m not scared anymore.” (Oh but the tears on her face.)

Altair hated her so strong and so brilliantly that it was a physical ache in his body so he couldn’t figure out why he caught her by the arm, why he pulled her limp body against his and wrapped his own arms around her. He couldn’t figure out why he ran his hand through her hair and pressed her face against his own wet skin as she started to cry. He couldn’t figure out a fucking thing but the feeling of her bones pressing against his as she clung to him with weak hands and terrible-hitching-sobs. “I hope it’s better where you’re going.” And that only made her cry harder.

\--

There was his promise to consider. In circumstances like these, the ‘right’ thing was never the ‘best’ thing but the least painful thing. Altair left Maria out in the sunshine when she finished crying and pushed him toward Malik. 

Now he stood like a coward outside of the curtain that divided him from Malik’s quiet sleeping breath and the now familiar stretch of his naked body. It wasn’t even decency that made him pause but sorting out his options to find the one that gave him the greatest chance of keeping Malik’s trust. Kadar had done the math, had seen all of the possible outcomes and decided that his brother’s best chance for survival was being as far away from this as he could get until it was done. (Oh, perhaps he was right. Maybe it was the best way.) 

“Malik!” Altair said when he swept the curtain to the side. He rushed over to the bed mat, dropped to his knees and rolled Malik from his side to his back. He looked right back into Malik’s wide unblinking (suddenly awake) eyes and said, “you have to get up. Something’s not right.” 

Malik was on his feet in the next instant, grabbing his pants to pull them on and dragging his shirt out of the tangle of bedclothes as he went through the curtain. He was headed out and away from the center of the complex, out into the sweet-sunshine and the wall at the edge of their attempt at a fortress. His hurried-footsteps brought him right across Maria who was lounging with that ever-dulling expression on her face. The sight of her made him stumble, made him stop and stare at her. “Maria?” he said. 

Her smile was the same weak-willed thing it had been before. She looked right at Malik (not at Altair-the-coward just to his left) and said, “I tried to tell him that you’d understand, Malik. He said you wouldn’t, he said that you would do anything to stop him. But you can’t because it’s already been done now. You were supposed to be gone.”

Malik’s face contorted in a ugly cross between rage-and-panic as he dropped his shirt and started running back the way he’d come. Maria gave him only a passingly reproachful look before she motioned after Malik. Altair ran hard to catch up to him, turned quick at the corners and found himself just footsteps behind Malik as he crashed into Kadar. Malik’s voice was a desperate scream of agony when he lifted his brother to his feet with the sheer power of his tight arms. 

“What did you do!” Malik screamed at him, “what have you done!” 

Kadar looked as bad as Maria looked: as if he were being emptied out and left hollow. Either he’d miscalculated the dosage of poison he claimed would take several days to work or he had created the entire conversation to play into his plan perfectly. Either way, he was too weak to push at his brother, too weak to protest and defend himself. His hands were pitiful as they cupped at Malik’s chest and neck in some vague attempt to push him off.

“Why?” Malik said in the next second. His voice was breaking open, his strong arms were quivering as his legs lost the strength to hold him. The two of them were sinking down, Kadar in a fatal slump and Malik with his fists twisting up in Kadar’s loose shirt. “Why? Why?”

Kadar’s hand was on the back of his brother’s neck and his forehead was pressed to Malik’s cheek. His voice was a weak little whisper when he said, “you wouldn’t understand, Malik. I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t just wait for it to find me. I could live anymore knowing it was inevitable.”

“You idiot,” Malik said. He was clutching at his brother’s back now, trying to drag him up, trying to shake life back into his body as it wilted against his. “What did you eat? Tell me how to undo this—we’ll find a way, you’ll find a way. You always find a way, you knew about this, you did all this to live—”

“No. I was ready to die months ago, when I figured it out. I had to save you, Malik. I had to get you out—to find a way to make sure you could survive. You’re so stupid, sometimes. You’ve always been so stupid. Don’t you understand? You would have stayed in that village, you would have died there. I couldn’t.” Kadar lifted himself away far enough to touch his brother’s face. “I couldn’t.”

Malik pulled Kadar back against his body, crushed his ramble of words and held on with all the strength in his arms. Altair left the room, slipped back out into the halls, past the rooms of the dying and out to where Maria was laying in the dirt watching the sun move across the sky. 

“Let’s pretend we’re lovers,” Maria said softly. “Let’s pretend you love me and I love you and we’re very old now.”

“We had sons,” Altair said when her voice faltered, “and they’re both grown now. You worry because our youngest is so sensitive, you worry if he’ll be alright when we’re gone but I know that we raised our sons to be strong. I know that you brought them up that way. I have grown old telling you to stop your worrying and you can’t because it’s part of who you are. So I hold your hand and I tell you—think about how we met in Italy by the canals. Think of the flutter of tourists maps when we ran into one another. You spoke French and I spoke English and we were a terrible mess.”

“I don’t speak French,” Maria whispered.

Altair’s hand was threaded through her cold fingers. “You did in Italy. You had been practicing ever since you decided to make your way through Europe. We laughed about afterward. I learned French for you and you didn’t even speak it. I loved you from the first moment I saw you, Maria. I’ve loved you all my life.” And they lay in the dirt as the day passed over their heads.

\--

They were all dead before midnight. Altair left Maria in the dirt where she died and went to find Malik sitting with his back against a solid wall. His legs were crossed in front of him and his arms were loose at his sides as he stared (unseeing) across the room to where his baby-brother’s corpse was laid out on a pile of bed things.

“Malik,” Altair said gently. He crouched to the side, but not in front of Malik. He didn’t touch him but look at him for signs of shock and found nothing but a fresh grief in his face and the deadened way he blinked and turned to look at him as if he couldn’t not even understand where Altair had come from. “You should leave this room.”

“I will stay,” Malik said to him.

Altair only nodded. 

\--

The morning came with relentless authority. Altair woke up to the sunlight pouring across the ground of the makeshift cell. It wasn’t much of a home but it was somewhere a great wealth of freshly dead corpses were not.

When he went looking, Malik was asleep by the wall of his brother’s room with his arm over his eyes and a restless shiver in his body. Nightmares came like a spill of nonsense sounds over his lips and Altair thought about waking him up to spare him the horror of those dreams and decided against it. 

Ever practical, his teachers had once said of him. Cold hearted, his grandmother had often accused him. Altair was not practical or cold hearted but aware (every second) that life was fleeting-at-best and every person in the world was one more person with the ability to wound him. He had spent the whole of his life avoiding friendships and attachments. When the zombies came, he ran for his life with the knowledge that there was no living creature left that would even have cared if he lived-or-died. 

Altair found the packs that had been prepared for them and sorted through the supplies they were given. He found the clothes Maria had intended for him to wear and pulled them on. The pants fit him better, the shirt was tight to his chest with a heavy jacket to cover his arms and chest as extra protection. There was a pair of boots that were a size too large but a pair of socks that seemed like a luxury one step too great for this God awful little fortress. 

\--

Grief did not keep Malik from finding him. Altair stayed by the quarantine cell with the ready packs and an assortment of firearms he had found not already packed. He had kept himself busy cleaning them properly and reassembling them in better working order. 

“Help me bury them,” Malik said. “When it is done, we can leave this place but I don’t want to leave them out to be picked at by poachers.” 

“Yeah,” Altair said.

\--

They took days to dig nine holes deep enough to suit the bodies meant to fill them. They started with Maria and Kadar and worked their way through men-and-women that Altair had only seen in passing (if at all). By the time they laid the final body to rest and covered it over with dirt again, Altair’s muscles were tight with protest and his body was a dangerous quiver of exhaustion.

Malik collapsed with him in the quarantine cell and they slept through the night and into the day again.

\--

“I’m sorry, Malik,” Altair said against Malik’s ear when he was reasonably sure the man was still sleeping. He might have said it to the man’s waking face if he weren’t mostly sure that he’d get punched for the effort. Malik seemed like a man held together by tenuous grip on anger that did nothing to cover the fresh wound in his chest. 

\--

On the sixth day, they picked up their packs and climbed to the top of the inner wall. Malik’s stare was faraway in the most dangerous way but Altair couldn’t afford to spend any more time in a camp full of dead bodies if he wanted Malik to survive to see the end of this apocalypse. So they climbed through the maze of broken vehicles, out and down to the ground beyond it. 

“We should go toward the sea,” Malik said, “they can’t swim. There must be a boat we can take, we’ll be safe in the water.”

So they walked toward the sea.

\--

Walking was easy enough. Altair kept watch first and Malik woke up and kept watch in the blistering daylight they were trying to sleep through. They moved in the dark with only the moon to light their path. Silence motivated the quickness of their footsteps like they were trying to outrun something far more horrific than what they were walking toward. 

\--

The putrid smell of rotting flesh came before they found themselves looking at the distant blot of a village. It rose out of the nothing all around them like a miniature landscape surely filled with monsters. Malik eyed it with a blank apathy and motioned for Altair to follow after him ever-onward toward zombies and their wet slap of their wordless jaws. They didn’t sleep so close to the village but rest in watchful cycles.

“Shoot them in the head,” Altair said when they were close enough the smell of the zombie’s rotting bodies was a taste in the air. He handed Malik a handgun to accent the many weapons he already had. He put a finger to his own forehead, “two shots if you can manage.”

“I can,” Malik assured him.

\--

And so they walked on. The streets of the village were filled with the bones of those who hadn’t been fast enough to escape. Their bodies were liquefied in putrid puddles gone sticky and thick in the many weeks-or-months since their deaths. The meat still clinging to the bone had gone soft and filled with maggots that feasted on the decay with genuine relish. Flies filled the air until Altair-and-Malik were forced to cover their mouths to keep from inhaling them. 

They found the bodies of zombies too, gaping jaws and ripped flesh in collapsed piles. Their glassy graying eyes had fixed with an unseeing gaze and their jaws were a congealed mess of half-eaten bits of their own flesh. Malik stared at one with a quiet hatred before he hurried on to find Altair again.

“Where have they all gone?” he asked.

“To where the food still is,” Altair said. They found a building and camped on its flat roof just before dawn. The creatures did not like the dark because it made it hard for them see (it was always hard to see for them, as far as he could tell) so they stuck to the daylight hours where game could be easily seen. 

Altair stood watch while Malik slept in fits and short bursts in between nightmares. He sat near the edge of the building where he could see over the edge but could not be so easily seen from the street. He heard the pitiful animal moan of the zombies as they walked with shuffling effort and arms out in front of them searching the short distance they could see for something to eat.

One of them caught an old cat and shared its bloody prize with the group. Altair watched them eat through the cat until there was nothing left but the bones too hard to snap. Malik woke and sat at his side watching them.

“Have you seen them before?” Altair asked. 

Malik shook his head. “No. Kadar came before they started to turn. He insisted we run, that we find somewhere distant to set up a camp. I heard about them from all those that found their way to us and I saw the signs as the people who made camp with us first started changing. I haven’t seen this.”

\--

When night fell, they made their way to the ground again. Malik was revived by fear in a way that was infinitely more comforting than the angry stupor he’d marched so far with. Altair stayed at his back with Maria’s favorite rifle cradled in his hands as he watched for the flesh-eating creatures to be drawn in by their smell.

Malik had accused his clothes of an unholy stench but the layers of filth left long unwashed had been enough of a deterrent to save his life more than once. The two of them were walking buffets, there was no reason to make the food smell _more appealing_.

\--

The next night they found themselves hunkered in the second story of an abandoned building with heavy doors. They dug up furniture to reinforce the shut door before they found places to rest by the windows that afforded them a good view of the street below. Malik was crouching with a gun in his lap, looking down at the creatures that came out with the dawn—sniffing the air like catching their scent. 

“They’re following us,” Malik said.

“They’re predators. They know how to follow meat when they find it. But they’re stupid predators—it’ll take them most of the day to figure out there’s a door to the building. It’ll take them longer to figure out that they can open the door. I stayed in a building like this for two days while they gathered outside the window. Wait until they start singing.” He wanted to turn his back on them—the one or two creatures standing on the ground with dulled-out eyes and decaying faces shuffling in the dirt sniffing for the source of the meat-smell—but he couldn’t. 

“What about the children?” Malik asked. 

“I haven’t seen any kid zombies. Maybe their bodies couldn’t handle the change or maybe I’ve just been lucky enough not to get that stuck in my head.” Probably the first because Altair had never had any amount of luck. “I’m going to try to sleep. Wake me if they go for the door.”

\--

By midday they had a crowd of six hunting them. Malik woke him with a boot to the thigh—sharp and sudden—but even if he hadn’t Altair would have woken up as soon as they low grunts they made turned into a sudden pitch of desperation. The sound was the bastard child of wail and a screech; utterly inhuman ripped out of the throats of things that were once human. It lacked melody but it rose-and-fell in cycles with each of the zombies clumping close to the first one to make the sound. It took once-twice for one scream to become two and two to become three and so on until there was a chorus of their pitiful wails. 

“What are they doing?” Malik asked.

“They’re hungry, they can’t figure out where the food is—” Altair picked up his rifle and found a reasonably decent vantage point that afforded him the best chance of taking out most of them in quick succession. His finger was on the trigger when he said, “cover your ears, Malik.” Then he shot them—the first singer first (the leader) and then the ones that reacted slowest, the ones that stayed still enough for him to find them easily. He had to track one or two of them before he could put a bullet in their head but one by one he took down five of them. 

Malik stood at the window over from his, hands cupped loosely around his ears as he watched. A twist of something like satisfaction made his face an unrecognizable mask. Altair lowered the rifle and leaned against the edge of the window while he waited for the sixth one to come crawling back out of the hole it had ducked into. “My brother said they won’t eat one another because the meat is bad.”

“He’s half right,” Altair said. “They won’t eat one another because they travel in packs. They’ll eat solitary zombies if they find them but it makes them sick. They’ll eat themselves if they get hungry enough but it makes them sick. But they don’t eat their friends.”

“They don’t have friends,” Malik snapped. 

Altair could have told him that he was wrong, could have argued the point with him. They could have wasted hours on the subject and never reached a conclusion so he kept his teeth tight together and watched the bodies of the things he just killed as they flatted out under the sun. 

\--

Number six came back with slumped shoulders and stumbling steps just as the sun had started to move toward the horizon. It came slowly, stood by the dead and kicked at their corpses again-and-again. It had to have smelled their death, the pungent odor of the thickened blood that oozed out of the holes Altair had put in them. 

Malik roused out of the uneasy sleep he’d fallen into at the desperate thumping of number six kicking the others. He shook his head to clear it and rolled toward the window so he could watch it. Number six tipped its head back, gore-stained mouth hanging open in a silent sound as it looked at the sky. Its arms were wooden at its sides as they lifted half way and fell again and again. Its jaw open-shut-open-shut before a guttural rattle came loud enough to be heard where they sat. In the next second its ear-splitting scream ripped in the air in one long-anxious note before it bubbled to a stop. But it came again, number six looked at its friends and screamed again when they stayed still. 

“Make it stop,” Malik said.

Altair raised the rifle and bought silence with one well-placed bullet. 

\--

Out beyond the village there was no cover but less reason to need it. The zombies stayed in the places with buildings, lingered where humanity’s smell was still the strongest. Altair had watched them roaming through the houses of the dead, picking at their things with a dulled curiosity and then leaving again when hunger drove them to hunt for bloody food. 

But out here, where there was nothing, the zombies floundered. 

“Why the sea?” Altair asked.

“I told you, they can’t swim. Kadar explained it to me in the beginning. There was no way to steal a boat back then, of course, but who’s going to stop us now?” 

\--

Malik shot two zombies the next time they had to find a tall place to hide. Altair took care of the third before it could start wailing in grief and they were left to sleep with the wafting stink of old death caught in the endless breeze.

\--

Along the side of the road between a village and a close-by city (far more dangerous than the little towns and villages they’d passed thus far) Malik stumbled and fell. His skin had gone pale-and-pink spotted in a matter of seconds and his body was shaking so violently (and so suddenly) that he could barely manage to pull his arms and legs in tight to his chest. 

“Fuck,” Altair shouted. He crouched but didn’t kneel next to Malik, put a hand to his forehead and felt the awful heat of his skin. The rattle of his breath was phlegm-filled. “Fuck,” he said again. For one brief moment, his whole mind went blank-and-empty. (Because survival necessitated movement and movement necessitated strength and strength necessitated health.) “Looks like your brother wasn’t wrong,” Altair said. He got an arm under Malik’s and dragged him back to his feet. “You have to walk,” he said (loud). “We have to _walk_.” But Altair wanted nothing so badly as he wanted to run like hell as far from Malik and the creatures and the whole fucking world filled to the brim with this-fucking-virus.

\--

The city came into view by the end of the night but Malik’s shuffling footsteps kept them crouching in a dip by the side of the road as the sun rose high and hot over their heads. Altair sat by the edge with the rifle across his lap and a handgun clenched in his fist. He dozed off-and-on, woke up by the nonsense moans Malik made through the fever. He poured water down Malik’s throat every-few minutes and watched the ungrateful scowl cross his face every time. 

The coughing started before sunset. It came like a bark turned wet by the sawing grate of mucous trying to work its way out of Malik’s chest. It was like a beacon, inviting every flesh eater in a two block radius to find them. 

“We have to keep walking,” Altair said (to himself, to Malik who wasn’t even listening). “We don’t stand a chance out here.” So he dragged Malik back to his feet and pushed him onward.

\--

Altair found the first building with a reliable door and dragged Malik through the darkened inside. It looked as if it had once been some kind of store—abandoned and left to fall into ruin. He checked the corners and the doors while Malik sat in a daze on a chair (like an offering on an altar) until he was sure there weren’t any creatures hiding inside. Then he dragged Malik up the stairs by the arm and found a room with the most windows and a dresser heavy enough to block the door shut.

There was a bed that he laid Malik out on. He stood there panting for breath from exertion, pouring sweat off his body in a steady stream, while Malik only lay still save for the few weakening coughs that jarred his body now and again. 

After a moment he collapsed and couldn’t manage to keep himself awake another moment-longer.

\--

Altair woke up to sunlight. He was lying on the ground in someone else’s bedroom with a sense of disorientation so great he’d nearly forgotten everything. He could have been a stupid teenager—stumbling drunk—waking up in his neighbor’s spare bedroom again. He had always been so bad at figuring out which window was his when he was drunk. Frieda had been nice enough about discovering him (time and time again) because she hated his Grandmother with all the passion Altair couldn’t manage himself. 

But it wasn’t Frieda’s room. It wasn’t anywhere close. Altair got up, touched Malik’s still-burning face and let out a sigh. The men in the barracks had been miserable with coughs and body aches, wracked with fevers that turned them into great babies but they’d never been taken down this hard or fast. (What had the TV told them about a weakened strain of the virus?) Altair rubbed his sweaty face with his dirty hand and then started pulling at Malik’s clothes. He took the jacket and his shirt and his pants off. The naked stretch of is body was coated in sweat even as Malik started shivering. 

Altair found the water and poured it into his resisting mouth. “Don’t you dare fucking die,” Altair hissed at him, “not after all this.” But the water was low and his supplies of food were in an even worse state. If Malik hadn’t gone all but comatose they would have run out on the road between there-and-here. “Fuck,” he snapped when he went through the bottles they used to keep the water in. 

“Fuck!” 

\--

Sullivan (from the old days, from the time before, big and dumb and blond) had spent hours and days of his life trying to figure out what kind of trouble Altair must have been before he joined the army. He said that trouble just hung off Altair, just held onto his shoulders and perched itself all around him like some great bird of prey.

The truth was, Altair had never been arrested. He had never had so much as a passing altercation with any sort of authority (save for his Grandmother whose word was more law than the law itself). He was an obedient boy, following the orders he was given with the utmost precision. 

All the effort of that, all of the concentration it had taken him to hold back (those screams left unvoiced) had driven him to the brink of sanity once. He’d discovered some fearless depth in his chest that gave his life a whole new meaning. Nothing—not anything—scared him because nothing (not anything) was _true_. Nothing had meaning, nothing had the power to touch him. This was what he’d learned as a child, it’s what gathered in his chest when he pulled himself out of the broken windows of the second story bedroom he left Malik shivering in. He pulled himself up to the roof and stood at the edge of it, blinking through the light to find something _useful_.

He looked down at the shirt he’d tied onto the broken part of the windows, looked out at a whole maze of buildings that looked so very similar to the one next to them. It was impossible to memorize them all so he picked a path, and then he set his teeth and backed away from the edge of the building to get a running start.

\--

Altair found water on his third try, just when he was about to give up for the day. His body was spent with exhaustion and the crying creatures in the streets had caught his scent. They couldn’t catch him on the roof but they could track him along his route with hungry-gaping mouths hoping he’d miss a step and fall into the thickening crowd of them. He crashed into a second floor pizzeria through a window.

There was a gash across the length of his arm and another across his face that had bled freely all over a towel. (He took a few towels and a few table clothes.) When the pain faded and the blood stopped, he went searching for water and food.

He found water and a few dozen other bottles that were too heavy to carry on his back. He took a minute to crack one of the wine bottles against the bar and poured it into a dusty glass to take a drink. Just a drink because alcohol made him clumsy at the best of times and this was far from it. 

There was a freezer in the back that looked as if it had lost power months ago from the rancid smell of pulpy foodstuffs. Everything inside was black-and-coated in fungus. The pantry offered him some better luck (not much) and he found the lightest cans he could manage to carry and stuffed them into his pack along with the bottles of water. There was an assortment of knives hanging against one wall and he took a few of them as well. 

Climbing out of the broken window was far easier than falling through it had been. He made it to the roof just as his shivering arms were ready to give out and sat there with his feet dangling over the edge while he caught his breath. The zombies were knocking into the walls below him, scratching at the stone and glass as they tried to find a way to get to him. Their wailing hunger grew to a fever pitch when he dropped the towel soaked in his blood into the center of their group. They were on it like rabid beasts and the distraction gave him enough time to run back along the path he’d laid for himself. 

Rooftop-to-rooftop, away from their snarling.

\--

Malik was on the floor when Altair dropped back in through the window. “Shit,” he snapped and pulled the man back up and laid him back on the bed. His breath was quick and shallow, his skin was all but _on fire_ and there was a thick green slime coming out of his nose and his mouth. Altair kept him propped on his side, used one of the towels he’d taken from the pizzeria to scrub the slime away. 

He spent a day and a night pouring water into Malik’s mouth and pulling the green slime out.

\--

Day five the fever finally broke and Malik slept with something approximating ease. Altair did not sleep so much as fall into unconsciousness as soon as the labored wheeze of Malik’s breath evened into something _familiar_. He slept through the desperate calls of starving zombies beyond the window, he slept through the sunrise and the sunset and woke up to find Malik sitting against the wall. 

“I fell,” Malik said. “I don’t—where are we? I don’t remember.”

“You got the virus,” Altair said. 

“I don’t remember it.” But Malik’s eyes still looked bruised and glassy. His body was weak as a newborns when Altair lifted him back up to the bed. They sat there for a moment, leaning their shoulders against one-another’s. “How long has it been?”

“Almost a week. Hungry? I’ve got olives and tomato sauce.” 

Malik made a face, all scrunched up and affronted by the offer of such terrible food before he started to fall back along the bed. “I’m tired,” he said.

Altair laid along the bed next to him and pulled the tablecloth he’d been using as a sheet over the two of them. “Let’s sleep a while longer then.”

\--

Malik got better but not stronger. He started moving around the room in restless cycles, holding his hands to his ears when the zombies’ ceaseless wailing had him on the edge of madness. Altair hadn’t hidden the guns but he’d managed to convince Malik that there was no point in trying to kill the ones that were under their window. More would come and take their place and they would be out of bullets long before they ran out of enemies. 

“If they’d just stop!” Malik screamed at the window.

“Maybe they’ll leave to follow me for a bit,” Altair said. He had emptied out the pack and slung it empty across his back. 

“I don’t see how that’s much of an improvement, actually.” Malik didn’t want him to go. It wasn’t a question of preference (because Altair would much rather not go himself) but a matter of necessity. They couldn’t hope to live much longer on thin tomato sauce and olives. The water was to the point of running out and they were stuck in place until Malik regained enough strength to run and climb. “Be careful.”

“Of course,” Altair said before he pulled himself up-and-out of the window toward the roof.

\--

It took six tries and a turn that Altair didn’t like (he tried to avoid curves because it was so very easy to forget where to turn) before he found anything that looked like food. There were cans-and-cans of it, processed and packaged. He grabbed as much as he could carry on his back and took a moment to rip open a little package of some kind of meat in water that tasted salty and indefinable.

He cut his lip on the edge of the tin and didn’t even care when his blood mixed in with the meat. He ate another-and-then another before his stomach started to turn on itself and he had to stop. His face and shirt were stained with the juice and it made the spaces between his fingers tacky. 

There was no room for water so he ran home-again with nothing but a sack full of food.

\--

They ate like kings for a few days. Malik got color back in his face and something like real strength back in his body. Altair left him twice to get water-and-more cans of the precious meat-stuff. 

Every time he came back, Malik was hiding in the corner farthest from the window with his hands across his ears and the chorus of wailing screams echoing all around the room. Altair hung two of the tablecloths across the windows to block out some of the sound while they were both inside but it did a poor job of dampening the noise. 

“How did this happen?” Malik asked him once, “how did we end up here?”

Altair shrugged because he was no genius and no philosopher. 

\--

When Malik was strong enough to climb to the roof, Altair started looking for the clearest and easiest path to the water. The smell of the sea carried in the air just over the unlivable stench of the rotting zombies and the bodies they had left in their wake of starvation. The city was immense and they were on the innermost edge of it. 

“What did you find,” Malik asked every day Altair came back to him. He had a pack of markers Altair found in the back of the pizzeria and the wide spread of a white tablecloth that he kept tether in place on the roof. The map was rudimentary and out of scale but it was growing out-and-onward to include all of the known places. 

“The buildings are too high here,” Altair said wiping his dirty finger across the edge of the known world. “If I want to go any farther I have to get on the ground. If I’m going to bother with that, we should move to somewhere with a higher vantage point. I think this building,” he touched the long shape Malik had drawn yesterday, “is a hotel or something very like it. We should be able to find somewhere to stay there.”

“How many of them are there?” Malik asked, “that far out, how many of them are still following you?”

“Not as many as there are here. We can’t stay here forever.” 

\--

Altair wasn’t sleeping but laying on the bed thinking of how they could reach the ground and the broken-open entrance to the hotel before they were spotted and chased. The zombies couldn’t manage stairs at any speed and they could not open doors at all so they only needed to find the staircase that led up through the building. 

But there was no way to know where it was before they were running through the building. It would be too dangerous to take many supplies with them because the weight would slow them down even more than Malik’s slow-recovery already had. They had to be light-and-fast.

Malik crawled back in through the window while he was thinking, dropped his map in the pile of things they meant to take with them when they left and spent a moment tinkering with the assortment of things Altair had brought back from his trips. They had made a pantry out of the things he’d stuffed into the pack here-and-there: spices and paper, silverware and soap, lotion and perfume, towels and T-shirts. 

When Malik came to the bed he was stripped out of his clothes. The light that came through the makeshift curtain did a poor job of illuminating his body with any real definition. His skin was tacky and rough when it pressed against Altair’s. Malik’s fingers were efficient when they pulled the clothes off Altair’s body until he was naked too. They were silent-strangers now, with Malik crawling up onto the bed to sit against his thighs and Altair with guilt hard a stone in his gut.

Altair’s hand brushed across the cool side of a bottle of lotion and he lifted it up to squint at the label (he couldn’t read) in the dimness before he looked at Malik over him. “I don’t understand.”

“We could die tomorrow,” Malik told him. “I lied to you before—only by omission—I hadn’t been with a man. Or a woman I guess. This is what I wanted from you, this was the dream I had.”

Altair sat up and kissed him. Malik clung to it with both arms and a surge of his body pressing itself as tight as it could against Altair’s. 

\--

In the morning, they stood at the top of the ugly little building they called their home and looked out at the stretch of the city before them. Altair could have run the rooftops in the dark, his feet and his body knew the way even when his eyesight was compromised, but Malik was still recovering and brand-new-to-it-all. 

Malik stood there now, with a mostly empty pack strapped to his back and his hands in fists at his sides as the sunlight caught in his face and made him squint downward at the crying zombies that were too stupid-or-too-stubborn to give up on the food they found. “I understand Kadar now, I understand the fear he must have felt every day. It comes to me in my dreams—their constant howling, the sound of their teeth crashing together and the impact of their bodies as they beat themselves against the walls of this building. I stand here safe above them but I know that if I falter even one step they will have me. But I have this body, I have my own strength to keep me safe from them. I’m more afraid now than I have ever been—but my death is not _certain_ while I still have means to prevent it.” 

“But he didn’t,” Altair said. “That was the point of it, wasn’t it? He had no way to fight what was going to happen to him.”

“He did not,” Malik said. “Don’t lose me. I am not as fast as you are.”

They took their places, got a running start and jumped across to the building not so far from their own. Malik landed hard but managed to stay on his feet, skidded to a stop when Altair would simply have kept running. There was a red exhilaration on his face and some great bark or surprise jumping out of his chest. He was crowing his own magnificent achievement with both arms in the air and _life_ in his face. 

“Celebrate quickly, we’ve got a long way to go yet.”

\--

When they reached he last rooftop before they had to drop to the ground they stopped with quickened breath and heavy sweat on their faces. Malik leaned over the edge of the roof and scanned the ground for signs of the zombies that had dogged them with unending hunger for so long. “I don’t see any of them,” Malik said.

“They’ll come if we wait very long,” Altair said. “I’ll go first. As soon as you hit the ground get a weapon in your hands and be ready to move _fast_.” Then he took a moment to offer some brief hope to the sky itself (or whatever deity might exist) that this was not the worst idea he’d ever had. Then he went over the edge of the building and let go. He caught a windowsill and then let go again so that when he hit the ground it was a jarring impact but not one that stood the chance of breaking his bones. 

Malik came after him, dropping with less grace but picking himself up off the ground with a gun already in hand. He ran close at Altair’s back across the distance between the short building to the broken doors of the hotel. Inside it looked like a battlefield with bodies and bones stripped bare by gnawing teeth laying across the floor and the furniture. There were dried brown smears on the walls. Malik was looking at the signs, mouthing the words under his breath until he found the sign that pointed them toward the stairs.

“This way!” he said.

It had been such a great plan (really) but it laid out in front of him now like the trap that it really was. Zombies couldn’t climb but they never-ever gave up when they scented blood. “Fuck,” he snapped.

Malik grabbed him by the air and yanked him down the hall toward the stairs. They were running headlong into a trap that he wasn’t sure they could get out of again but Malik was pulling him like the devil himself was at their fucking heels. The doorway to the stairwell was blocked by a body and Malik jumped over it with a carelessness that seemed so drastically out of character it was painful. Altair caught the corpse by the feet and pulled it out of the way of the closing door before he shoved his way through it. 

They were safe, more or less, but Malik was racing up the stairs without a moment’s pause.

\--

The hotel stood eight stories high—like a great mammoth compared to the paltry accommodations they’d grown accustom to. The view from the top gave them an imperfect line of sight to the sea itself and the freedom Malik thought they’d find there. For now they were overwhelmed with luxury. The rooms were an endless litany of well stocked snack bars and mini bars full of little bottles of liquor and room-temperature water and other mixers. There were blankets and towels and bathrobes that were fluffy as clouds against their ragged skin. 

The first day they slept like kings in massive beds.

The second they searched through the rooms on the eighth floor and found three bathtubs filled with water (one last grasp at survival from the minds of practical people, perhaps). Altair scooped it out with an ice bucket and scrubbed himself clean in the sink. Dirt and blood rinsed away and left him bleeding and raw. There was an endless array of travel-sized lotions that promised him softer-skin. He slathered it over his body and walked the hallway with the bathrobe hanging open around his burning skin. He found Malik shaving with some dead man’s razor.

“I could use a haircut,” Altair said. He went through the grooming kit the man had left behind and found himself impressed and confused by the assortment of devices he found. There were scissors though so Malik took him out on the balcony so high above the ground they could only just barely hear the chorus of the zombies begging for a taste of their flesh. Altair threw the tufts of his hair out into the wind and watched them flutter away. 

\--

On the third day, they organized the left over clothes from guests who never had a chance at escape. There was an assortment of fine dresses and tourist clothes that they dropped into a discard pile for later use. Malik appreciated a fine jacket and found a pair of dark gray dress slacks that fit him perfectly.

“Put the belt on,” Altair said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing only his bathrobe, watching Malik appreciate the feeling of fine clothes against his skin. There was a blissful look on his face as he kicked his legs just to feel the slip of the cloth. When he put the belt on, he looked every-inch a businessman escaping a long day. It snaked around his slim waist and accentuated the natural curve of his spine and his ass. “This is a good look for you.”

Malik was full of power when he looked at him then, more alive in that moment than he’d ever been before. He stepped forward toward Altair, grabbed the rolled edge of his bathroom and shoved it down over his shoulders so it pulled his arms back just slightly. “This is a good look for you,” he said.

“You’re so direct,” Altair said.

“It works,” Malik answered back.

\--

On the fourth day they were dressed in something serviceable, gathering all the supplies they’d picked out of the other rooms. They put everything in one of the rooms with a bathtub full of water. They left the glass door that led to the balcony open and Malik stood out at the edge looking over the city like he was memorizing the lay of it for his map. 

Altair peered over the edge to the crowd of zombies gathering at the base of the building. He thought (we’re never getting out of here) but they were safe for now (at least). 

\--

By the start of their second week stuck in the hotel, they’d exhausted their search of the top floor and struck out to investigate the second. Malik spent a day in a rage when he came across a room full of a child’s things. Maybe he’d forgotten or maybe he’d just not had the time to think about the children that must have been lost in this apocalypse but it hit hard as he piled everything together and sent it flying over the edge of a balcony with a scream of anger there was just no answer to.

\--

Week by week they worked their way down through the hotel, stole any bit of still-edible food they came across. They took the clothes that fit them, ripped clean bed sheets from unused rooms and took pillows to stack against the balcony in their room so the last strains of shrieking they heard was muffled even further. 

Sooner or later it was inevitable they found find the dead. The fourth floor was full of them, rancid and thick with the odor of old death. They found the putrid bodies in states of decay that marked them as human-or-zombie. Malik stared at the dead creatures with a sneer of hatred but he said, “so they can die.”

“Everything can die,” Altair said. He opened the balconies and they spent days and days carrying the bodies out to throw them over. They could only manage one or two a day before they were gagging as they ran for their lives up-and-up to the top floor where they’d horded all of their supplies so carefully. 

\--

“I think it’s making them sick,” Malik said on a third-floor balcony as he watched the horde of zombies ripping decayed flesh from broken bones. They were slower-now than they had been before and there were fewer of them. One or two of the group broke away from the feast with a bleat of hurt before they were scratching at their own bloodied throats and gagging. 

“Good,” Altair said.

\--

Altair had walked for months, had crossed the world he knew nothing about and found no more than a few dozen survivors clumped together in tight groups. The zombies were large in number but spread out so thin across the ruined landscape that they seemed inconsequential. It was not the wild mass of horror movies but a slower-crawl of creatures that slithered out of everywhere at only the slightest hint of something worth-eating. But survivors were harder to find the longer he walked either because there were fewer or because they had gotten better at hiding. 

Malik stood on the roof of the hotel, looking out toward the sea, and he said, “there should have been someone else. We should have found someone else alive by now. They can’t all be dead.”

But they could be, because Altair’s entire base had been overrun by the bastards in a matter of hours. Everyone-everywhere could very well be _dead_.

\--

Sooner or later, the food was going to run out. Altair started knotting sheets together and Malik divided their stash of stale crackers, processed sweets and canned things into daily rations that did nothing to stop the gnaw of hunger that occupied the endless hours of their day. 

The zombies at the base of the building had thinned out after they gorged themselves on rotting flesh and found it distasteful. But there were a few that stayed, bleating now-and-again with the same angry hunger that drove Malik up and down the hall in an endless pace. 

Altair knotted bed sheets and circled the building looking for his best-chance at escape. 

\--

When they couldn’t wait any longer, Malik fed Altair the best of the slim lot they had horded, rubbed his back until he slept like a child and woke him up with sweet affectionate kisses. Malik stood on a balcony with a good vantage point with the rifle trained on the zombies that wandered in the space between the hotel and the lower building next to it. “You better come back,” Malik said.

Altair was dangling off the end of knotted bed sheets, bracing his legs against the building to give himself enough momentum to swing out across the space and land somewhere approximately (hopefully) on the roof of the next building. He said, “you better be waiting for me.”

It took two tries before he had enough momentum at the end of the swinging rope to throw his body through the air. He landed on his shoulder in a way that made his vision blank out black and spotted for a moment but he landed safe-and-high. 

“Altair!” Malik screamed at him.

“Alive!” he shouted back. Then he picked himself up and shook the pain off. “Alive,” he repeated to himself quieter.

\--

There was a convenient store on the corner that pandered to tourists (his guess, no actual fact). It was stocked with souvenirs and novelty things against one long wall but there were shelves of easy-to-eat food that kept well. Altair stuffed his pack full of anything that looked like it was still good while he watched the door for creeping-crawling creatures. He took an assortment of individual-sized medications from behind the register and stuffed them in with the food. 

Out on the street, he ran back to the gutted restaurant that stood two stories tall and allowed him the best jumping-off point to climb back through the city to the hotel that loomed in the not-so-distant sky. 

\--

There was no way to climb back up the bed sheets. Malik was still there when Altair made it back. “Good of you to return!” he shouted.

“I was shopping!” Altair answered. He sat at the edge of the building and watched the few zombies circling the hotel. “We need a better entrance!” he said. Then he dropped off the side of the building while Malik screamed a wordless protest. When he hit the ground the impact knocked him over and a curious-huffing sound was so close it felt like a ghost of hot breath on his neck. Altair shot the thing that stood a good ten feet away from him before he even managed to get fully on his feet again. The sharp report of the gun brought a rushing of others. They came from the ruined doors of the hotel, from the corner that led down the street where Altair had been only a bit ago. 

It couldn’t have been more than a dozen but the stink of their bodies was like a crushing crowd. A shot rang from somewhere over his head and one of the zombies fell forward with a gush of dark-blood. It gave him a path (if only a narrow one) to squeeze through as he raced toward the hotel’s ground floor. 

One of the things grabbed his arm and it was nothing but instinct when he kicked it in the knee and sent it crashing backward into another one just behind the first. Altair shot the second one and a third but they came _anyway_ heedless of imminent death. 

He ran for the door to the stairwell and found a zombie smacking its head against the door. Its blood was a black streak and its skull was caving in from the pressure and still the door stood impervious to its attempts. Altair shot it and kicked it’s corpse out of the way as he yanked the door open and pulled it shut behind him. The sudden slam of a body against the door threw him backward away from it. He only (just barely) recovered quickly enough to be sure the door latched before the creature slammed into it again with a pained screech of hunger. 

Altair went backward, stumbling, toward the steps. He pressed his back against the cool wall until he was on the second-floor landing and collapsed there with his fingers through his hair and his knees pulled up to his chest. He was breathing-trying-to-think-but there was nothing-nothing but the repeating thud of _things_ trying to find their way into the stairwell. There was nothing-at-all but the same hungry screams.

\--

Malik found him in a rush of footsteps and worried hands. Malik found him with a blur of words and wide-white eyes. Malik found him. 

“Altair!” he said. “Altair!”

\--

But Altair thought of his father, thought of his body caught in a slow swing as it swayed back-and-forth in a lazy rhythm. He thought of the creak of the beam his father had chosen to be his gallows. He thought of the bright-red-rope that he’d used to make his noose. He thought of the unfamiliar bloat of his face and the lolling purple obscenity that was his tongue. Altair thought of the cool garage—still early spring, still snow on the ground—and the hard pavement stained with the gush of his father’s dead body relaxing muscles. 

No, he thought of his Grandmother’s hands like talons, ripping him away. 

\--

Altair woke up on the eighth floor, in the room they had made for themselves. Malik was sleeping at his side with one hand across his back like he was trying to remind himself that Altair-still-lived. 

“I’m sorry,” Altair said. 

Malik’s arm pulled him up against the comforting warmth of his body. “You’re not going alone next time. I won’t leave you out there by yourself again.” And Altair kissed him-because-he-could. Because they were not dead yet, not while they still had time and the strength of their bodies. Malik kissed him back, pushed him flat against the bed and held him there with an authority that was steadily growing more _expected_. 

\--

They survived the winter as the zombies grew slower-and-fewer. Malik found a shop near the water that had an inspiring stock of fishing poles and they crouched at the end of piers when the wind was cold off the water until they were shivering-and-sick from it. 

Altair stole armfuls of warm hoodies from tourists shops while Malik raided every building they came across for socks and better fitting shoes. The lived like kings—in solitude—wandering from building to building taking whatever they pleased. 

\--

It was easy to feel like the last living things in the world. They holed up in their top-floor hotel room surrounded by things they saw-and-stole while the world went on without them. Spring came as flowers in patches of untended dirt and the brightening strength of sun breathing a fresh warmth into the air. 

Malik had mastered fishing by spring and Altair had built a fire pit on the balcony where they roasted their catches and ate with burnt fingers and greasy faces. 

\--

It was nearly summer when Malik shot the last zombie they’d seen in weeks. The others he’d killed in fear and revulsion but that last whimpering creature he shot with a look of pity on his face. They walked in the empty streets, stepping over the bodies and through the broken debris of a long-abandoned city. 

\--

But it was the sound of a helicopter that woke them from the dreary delirium. It came in the afternoon, when the sun was highest in the sky. Altair heard it first and ran for the stairs that gave them access to the roof. Malik was right after him with his hair full of shampoo and his fingers white with suds. They must have looked ridiculous from above—two little specs on a rooftop whooping and jumping for attention. 

Altair fired one of their last bullets into the air—far from the helicopter—and it turned around to face them again. He didn’t even recognize the damn thing, didn’t think it came from anywhere he’d ever called home but it was a sign of _life_ in a world where it had long been absent.

\--

The men, when they finally came, spoke French with large smiles and graciously open arms.

“English,” Altair said. He had taken high-school-French and it had funneled out through his head in all the years since. Even English tasted strange in his mouth after so long with only Malik to speak to. 

“English,” the man said, “English is good. We have come to take you—there is a safe place in the north. We’re gathering survivors there, trying to rebuilding.” They were patient with them, obligingly allowed Malik-and-Altair to gather what things they’d grown attached to in the past months. When it was loaded on the chopper, they were muttering in French again, lifting them high-and-above the city and all the dead still inside of it.

\--


End file.
